“Somewhere between obsession and compulsion is impulse.”

Ecstasy is a glass full of tea and a piece of sugar in the mouth.

Inspiration is needed in geometry, just as much as in poetry.

My whole life has been pledged to this meeting with you.

Please, never despise the translator. He’s the mailman of human civilization.

Sad that our finest aspiration, Our freshest dreams and meditations, In swift succession should decay, Like Autumn leaves that rot away.

I’ve lived to bury my desires, And see my dreams corrode with rust; Now all that’s left are fruitless fires That burn my empty heart to dust.

Thank you, darling, for learning to play chess. It is an absolute necessity for any well organized family. (in a letter to his wife)

Don’t be sad, don’t be angry, if life deceives you! Submit to your grief – your time for joy will come, believe me.

I do not like Moscow life. You live here not as you want to live, but as old women want you to.

Mistress-like, its brilliance vain, highly capricious and inane.

With womankind, the less we love them, the easier they become to charm.

Thus people–so it seems to me– Become good friends from sheer ennui.

Moscow, how many strains are fusing in that one sound, for Russian hearts! What store of riches it imparts!

Better the illusions that exalt us than ten thousand truths.

Try to be forgotten. Go live in the country. Stay in mourning for two years, then remarry, but choose somebody decent.

If you but knew the flames that burn in me which I attempt to beat down with my reason.

Even for learned men, love of fame is the last thing to be given up.

The denial of an objective moral law, based on the compulsion to deny the existence of God, results ultimately in the denial of evil itself.

When we experience the power of the Self, there is an absence of fear, there is no compulsion to control, and no struggle for approval or external power.

It’s a compulsive need to wreck everything. You might notice there’s a pattern of stripping down and building back up again throughout my life. But I guess that’s how some of us conduct our lives.

We will always find fundamentally the compulsion to become what the soul should be.

Bodily exercise, when compulsory, does no harm to the body; but knowledge which is acquired under compulsion obtains no hold on the mind.

Writing for me is a kind of compulsion, so I don’t think anyone could have made me do it, or prevented me from doing it.

Knowledge which is acquired under compulsion has no hold on the mind.