“All mothers are mothers of great people, and it is not their fault that life later disappoints them.”

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.

Literature is the art of discovering something extraordinary about ordinary people, and saying with ordinary words something extraordinary.

He was a natural, and in the Russian way, tragically above these banalities.

No bad man can be a good poet.

But the division in him was a sorrow and a torment, and he became accustomed to it only as one gets used to an unhealed and frequently reopened wound.

Art always serves beauty, and beauty is the joy of possessing form, and form is the key to organic life since no living thing can exist without it.

I used to be very revolutionary, but now I think that nothing can be gained by brute force. People must be drawn to good by goodness.

It is not the object described that matters, but the light that falls on it.

She was here on earth to make sense of its wild enchantments.

Poetry is a rich, full-bodied whistle, cracked ice crunching in pails, the night that numbs the leaf, the duel of two nightingales, the sweet pea that has run wild, Creation’s tears in shoulder blades.

Art has two constant, two unending concerns: It always meditates on death and thus always creates life. All great, genuine art resembles and continues the Revelation of St John.

He comes as a guest to the feast of existence, and knows that what matters is not how much he inherits but how he behaves at the feast, and what people remember and love him for.

Let there be no disappointment when obedience keeps you busy in outward tasks. If it sends you to the kitchen, remember that the Lord walks among the pots and pans.

Feelings like disappointment, embarrassment, irritation, resentment, anger, jealousy, and fear, instead of being bad news, are actually very clear moments that teach us where it is that we’re holding back.

Better to be an optimist who gets disappointed than a pessimist who has no hope.

Most things disappoint till you look deeper.

Pessimism is playing the sure game. You cannot lose at it; you may gain. It is the only view of life in which you can never be disappointed. Having reckoned what to do in the worst possible circumstances, when better arise, as they may, life becomes child’s play.

At the end of the day everybody lost. We almost crippled our industry. It was very disappointing what happened.

It’ll be great. Of course I was disappointed last year. But I’ll get my revenge.

I was taught to put my best into anything I did and I can honestly say I’ve always done that. Still, there are many times when I failed, when I was disappointed.