“The writer is the Faust of modern society, the only surviving individualist in a mass age. To his orthodox contemporaries he seems a semi-madman.”

To be a woman is a great adventure; To drive men mad is a heroic thing.

What is laid down, ordered, factual is never enough to embrace the whole truth: life always spills over the rim of every cup.

In every generation there has to be some fool who will speak the truth as he sees it.

The last moments slipped by, one by one, irretrievable.

No deep and strong feeling, such as we may come across here and there in the world, is unmixed with compassion. The more we love, the more the object of our love seems to us to be a victim.

It is no longer possible for lyric poetry to express the immensity of our experience. Life has grown too cumbersome, too complicated. We have acquired values which are best expressed in prose.

Salvation lies not in the faithfulness to forms, but in the liberation from them.

Love is not weakness. It is strong. Only the sacrament of marriage can contain it.

I hate everything you say, but not enough to kill you for it.

Failure to love is almost like murder.

And remember: you must never, under any circumstances, despair. To hope and to act, these are our duties in misfortune.

Departure beyond the borders of my country is for me equivalent to death.

If you want to know, life is the principle of self-renewal, it is constantly renewing and remaking and changing and transfiguring itself.

During the last years of Mayakovski’s life, when all poetry had ceased to exist . . . literature had stopped.

And so it turned out that only a life similar to the life of those around us, merging with it without a ripple, is genuine life, and that an unshared happiness is not happiness.

In this era of world wars, in this atomic age, values have changed. We have learned that we are guests of existence, travelers between two stations. We must discover security within ourselves.

Valentines Day itself, like most holidays in the modern era, has been heavily influenced by commercialism that focuses on the appeal of romantic fantasies.

They both, when we study that grand tapestry known as history and modern-day society, tend to stand out in much bolder relief than other figures from Dancing with Madness, Dancing with Genius

As sad as it may be to admit, in our modern world people are far more accustomed to hearing news of war, genocide, murder, disasters, famine, and disease

A modern revolutionary group heads for the television station, not the factory. It concentrates its energy on infiltrating and changing the image system.

As far as modern writing is concerned, it is rarely rewarding to translate it, although it might be easy. Translation is very much like copying paintings.

Wars in old times were made to get slaves. The modern implement of imposing slavery is debt.

Her heart is like poetry a modern poetry only understood by some and accepted by few.

Just as modern motorways have no room for ox-carts or wandering pedestrians, so modern society has little place for lives and ways that are too eccentric.