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When we retreat to the country, we are hiding not from people, but from our pride, which, in the city and among people, operates unfairly and immoderately.
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The person who wants nothing, hopes for nothing, and fears nothing can never be an artist.
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Love is a great thing. It is not by chance that in all times and practically among all cultured peoples love in the general sense and the love of a man for his wife are both called love. If love is often cruel or destructive, the reason lies not in love itself, but in the inequality between people.
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Is it our job to judge? The gendarme, policemen and bureaucrats have been especially prepared by fate for that job. Our job is to write, and only to write.
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It always seems to the brothers and the father that their brother or son didn't marry the right person.
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It is a poor thing for the writer to take on that which he doesn’t understand.
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In Western Europe people perish from the congestion and stifling closeness, but with us it is from the spaciousness.... The expanses are so great that the little man hasn’t the resources to orient himself.... This is what I think about Russian suicides.
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Do you know when you may concede your insignificance? Before God or, perhaps, before the intellect, beauty, or nature, but not before people. Among people, one must be conscious of one’s dignity.
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Tsars and slaves, the intelligent and the obtuse, publicans and pharisees all have an identical legal and moral right to honor the memory of the deceased as they see fit, without regard for anyone else’s opinion and without the fear of hindering one another.
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Solomon made a great mistake when he asked for wisdom.
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I would love to meet a philosopher like Nietzsche on a train or boat and to talk with him all night. Incidentally, I don’t consider his philosophy long-lived. It is not so much persuasive as full of bravura.
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There are in life such confluences of circumstances that render the reproach that we are not Voltaires most inopportune.
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Watching a woman make Russian pancakes, you might think that she was calling on the spirits or extracting from the batter the philosopher’s stone.
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Despite your best efforts, you could not invent a better police force for literature than criticism and the author’s own conscience.
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One must speak about serious things seriously.
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Moscow is a city that has much suffering ahead of it.
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The cherry orchard is now mine!... I bought the estate on which my grandfather and father were slaves, where they were not even permitted in the kitchen.
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There is nothing more awful, insulting, and depressing than banality.
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Everything is good in due measure and strong sensations know not measure.
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Despicable means used to achieve laudable goals render the goals themselves despicable.
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The wealthy man is not he who has money, but he who has the means to live in the luxurious state of early spring.
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Isolation in creative work is an onerous thing. Better to have negative criticism than nothing at all.
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In two or three hundred years life on earth will be unimaginably beautiful, astounding. Man needs such a life and if it hasn’t yet appeared, he should begin to anticipate it, wait for it, dream about it, prepare for it. To achieve this, he has to see and know more than did his grandfather and father.
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Country acquaintances are charming only in the country and only in the summer. In the city in winter they lose half of their appeal.