I had ambition not only to go farther than any man had ever been before, but as far as it was possible for a man to go.
You shall judge a man by his foes as well as by his friends.
Words, as is well known, are the great foes of reality.
It is not the clear-sighted who rule the world. Great achievements are accomplished in a blessed, warm fog.
Going home must be like going to render an account.
History repeats itself, but the special call of an art which has passed away is never reproduced. It is as utterly gone out of the world as the song of a destroyed wild bird.
Who knows what true loneliness is - not the conventional word but the naked terror? To the lonely themselves it wears a mask. The most miserable outcast hugs some memory or some illusion.
The scrupulous and the just, the noble, humane, and devoted natures; the unselfish and the intelligent may begin a movement - but it passes away from them. They are not the leaders of a revolution. They are its victims.
Any work that aspires, however humbly, to the condition of art should carry its justification in every line.
It is a maudlin and indecent verity that comes out through the strength of wine.
A man that is born falls into a dream like a man who falls into the sea. If he tries to climb out into the air as inexperienced people endeavor to do, he drowns.
As to honor - you know - it's a very fine mediaeval inheritance which women never got hold of. It wasn't theirs.
All ambitions are lawful except those which climb upward on the miseries or credulities of mankind.
To a teacher of languages there comes a time when the world is but a place of many words and man appears a mere talking animal not much more wonderful than a parrot.
Criticism, that fine flower of personal expression in the garden of letters.
Truth of a modest sort I can promise you, and also sincerity. That complete, praiseworthy sincerity which, while it delivers one into the hands of one's enemies, is as likely as not to embroil one with one's friends.
It is respectable to have no illusions, and safe, and profitable and dull.
Don't you forget what's divine in the Russian soul and that's resignation.
He who wants to persuade should put his trust not in the right argument, but in the right word. The power of sound has always been greater than the power of sense.
How does one kill fear, I wonder? How do you shoot a specter through the heart, slash off its spectral head, take it by its spectral throat?
