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

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.

Then came a moment of renaissance, I looked up – you again are there, A fleeting vision, the quintessence Of all that`s beautiful and rare.

Then I realize what it is. It’s him. Something about him makes me feel like I am about to fall. Or turn to liquid. Or burst into flames.

Unless a love of virtue light the flame,

I am not against hasty marriages, where a mutual flame is fanned by an adequate income.

We are so much the victims of abstraction that with the Earth in flames we can barely rouse ourselves to wander across the room and look at the thermostat.

The other damned saw what was happening and caught hold of it too. She was indignant and cried, “Let go-it’s my onion,” and as soon as she said, “my onion,” the stalk broke and she fell back into the flames.

A snowy, moonlit peak, with its single star, soaring up to the passionate blue; or against the flames of sunset, an old yew-tree standing dark guardian of some fiery secret.

But this night our feet must tread in thorny paths, or later, and for ever, the feet you love must walk in paths of flame!

Since love first made the breast an instrument Of fierce lamenting, by its flame my heart Was molten to a mirror, like a rose I pluck my breast apart, that I may hang This mirror in your sight.