It seems to me that all of the evil in life comes from idleness, boredom, and psychic emptiness, but all of that is inevitable when you become accustomed to living at others' expense.
You don't understand, you fool' says Yegor, looking dreamily up at the sky. 'You've never understood what kind of person I am, nor will you in a million years... You just think I'm a mad person who has thrown his life away... Once the free spirit has taken hold of a man, there's no way of getting it out of him.
Nothing lulls and inebriates like money; when you have a lot, the world seems a better place than it actually is.
I am dying. I haven't drunk champagne for a long time.
Write about this man who, drop by drop, squeezes the slave's blood out of himself until he wakes one day to find the blood of a real human being--not a slave's--coursing through his veins.
He is no longer a city dweller who has even once in his life caught a ruff or seen how, on clear and cool autumn days, flocks of migrating thrushes drift over a village. Until his death he will be drawn to freedom.
We go to great pains to alter life for the happiness of our descendants and our descendants will say as usual: things used to be so much better, life today is worse than it used to be.
The time has come for writers, especially those who are artists, to admit that in this world one cannot make anything out, just as Socrates once admitted it, just as Voltaire admitted it.
I still lack a political, religious and philosophical world view - I change it every month - and so I'll have to limit myself to descriptions of how my heroes love, marry, give birth, die, and how they speak.
If there is a gun hanging on the wall in the first act, it must fire in the last.
Indeed, in Russia there is a terrible poverty of facts, and a terrible abundance of reflections of all sorts.
I long to embrace, to include in my own short life, all that is accessible to man. I long to speak, to read, to wield a hammer in a great factory, to keep watch at sea, to plow. I want to be walking along the Nevsky Prospect, or in the open fields, or on the ocean - wherever my imagination ranges.
The time's come: there's a terrific thunder-cloud advancing upon us, a mighty storm is coming to freshen us up....It's going to blow away all this idleness and indifference, and prejudice against work....I'm going to work, and in twenty-five or thirty years' time every man and woman will be working.
My holy of holies is the human body.
Wherever there is degeneration and apathy, there also is sexual perversion, cold depravity, miscarriage, premature old age, grumbling youth, there is a decline in the arts, indifference to science, and injustice in all its forms.
Our pride and self-importance are European, while our development and actions are Asiatic.
A tree is beautiful, but what's more, it has a right to life; like water, the sun and the stars, it is essential. Life on earth is inconceivable without trees. Forests create climate, climate influences peoples' character, and so on and so forth. There can be neither civilization nor happiness if forests crash down under the axe, if the climate is harsh and severe, if people are also harsh and severe. ... What a terrible future!
A writer is not a confectioner, a cosmetic dealer, or an entertainer.
Country acquaintances are charming only in the country and only in the summer. In the city in winter they lose half of their appeal.
Writers are as jealous as pigeons.
If you can't distinguish people from lap-dogs, you shouldn't undertake philanthropic work.
It is as acceptable now to love the wives of others as it is to smoke their cigars and read their books.
There ought to be a man with a hammer behind the door of every happy man.
Eyes - the head's chief of police. They watch and make mental notes.
In descriptions of nature one must seize on small details, grouping them so that when the reader closes his eyes he gets a picture.
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