“Everything that’s prose isn’t verse and everything that isn’t verse is prose. Now you see what it is to be a scholar!”

You have but to hold forth in cap and gown, and any gibberish becomes learning, all nonsense passes for sense.

Show some mercy to this chair which has stretched out its arms to you for so long; please satisfy its desire to embrace you!

Some of the most famous books are the least worth reading. Their fame was due to their having done something that needed to be doing in their day. The work is done and the virtue of the book has expired.

Unreasonable haste is the direct road to error.

It infuriates me to be wrong when I know I’m right.

Every good act is charity. A man’s true wealth hereafter is the good that he does in this world to his fellows.

Those whose conduct gives room for talk are always the first to attack their neighbors.

No matter what everybody says, ultimately these things can harm us only by the way we react to them.

Man, I can assure you, is a nasty creature.

The public scandal is what constitutes the offence: sins sinned in secret are no sins at all.

I would like to be like my father and all the rest of my ancestors who never married.

The road is a long one from the projection of a thing to its accomplishment.

The less we deserve good fortune, the more we hope for it.

At least it’s better to be married than to be dead.

Most people die from the remedy rather than from the illness.

I have a heart to love all the world; and like Alexander I wish there were yet other worlds, so I could carry even further my amorous conquests.

You’re trying to take something that can be described in many, many sentences and pages of prose, but you can convert it into a couple lines of poetry and you still get the essence, so it’s that compression. The best code is poetry.

Prose exists to convey meaning, and no meaning such as prose conveys can be expressed as well in poetry. That’s not poetry’s purpose.

I wish our clever young poets would remember my homely definitions of prose and poetry; that is, prose = words in their best order; – poetry = the best words in the best order.

If Christ lives in us, we will rejoice in everything, and we will thank and praise the Lord. We will say, ‘Hallelujah! Praise the Lord’ forever.

In response, Krzhizhanovsky’s prose has a recklessly unstable tone in which delighted examination of impossible worlds can slip into ferocious political sarcasm.

An appreciation of prose is learned, not instinctive. It is an acquired taste, like Scotch whisky.

All which is not prose is verse; and all which is not verse is prose.

Poetry must be as well written as prose.