“In a separation it is the one who is not really in love who says the more tender things.”

The only true voyage of discovery, would be not to visit strange lands but to possess other eyes.

There are optical illusions in time as well as space.

We love only what we do not wholly possess.

People don’t know when they are happy. They’re never so unhappy as they think they are.

One becomes moral as soon as one is unhappy.

The fixity of a habit is generally in direct proportion to its absurdity.

Love is space and time measured by the heart.

The artist who gives up an hour of work for an hour of conversation with a friend knows that he is sacrificing a reality for something that does not exist.

A change in the weather is sufficient to recreate the world and ourselves.

It comes so soon, the moment when there is nothing left to wait for.

The courage of one’s opinions is always a form of calculating cowardice in the eyes of the other side.

My destination is no longer a place, rather a new way of seeing.

Time, which changes people, does not alter the image we have retained of them.

Love ever unsatisfied, lives always in the moment that is about to come.

The real voyage of discovery consists not in seeking new landscapes, but in having new eyes.

Like many intellectuals, he was incapable of saying a simple thing in a simple way.

The whole world recognizes Russia’s cultural achievements. It is impossible to imagine the world culture without Russian culture, without our music and literature.

It has become almost a cliché to remark that nobody boasts of ignorance of literature, but it is socially acceptable to boast ignorance of science and proudly claim incompetence in mathematics.

For books continue each other, in spite of our habit of judging them separately.

Literature is strewn with the wreckage of those who have minded beyond reason the opinion of others.

There is nothing which can better deserve our patronage than the promotion of science and literature. Knowledge is in every country the surest basis of public happiness.

Literature, it seems to me, is wisdom.

All great literature is one of two stories; a man goes on a journey or a stranger comes to town.

Literature is my Utopia