“What’s terrible is that there’s nothing terrible, that the very essence of life is petty, uninteresting, and degradingly trite.”

There is a sweetness in being the sole source, the autocratic and irresponsible cause of the greatest joy and profoundest pain to another.

It’s all romanticism, nonsense, rottenness, art.

I never started from ideas but always from character.

Youth eats all the sugared fancy cakes and regards them as its daily bread. But there’ll come a time when you’ll start asking just for a crust.

People without firmness of character love to make up a fate for themselves; that relieves them of the necessity of having their own will and of taking responsibility for themselves.

I am a flirt: I have no heart: I have an actor’s nature.

We Russians have assigned ourselves no other task in life but the cultivation of our own personalities, and when we’re barely past childhood, we set to work to cultivate them, those unfortunate personalities.

I was as happy as a fish in water, and I could have stayed in that room for ever, have never left that place.

That’s what children are for—that their parents may not be bored.

A poet must be a psychologist, but a secret one: he should know and feel the roots of phenomena but present only the phenomena themselves in full bloom or as they fade away.

I do not know what the heart of a bad man is like. But i do know what the heart of a good man is like. And it is terrible.

In days of doubt, in days of dreary musings on my country’s fate, you alone are my comfort and support, oh great, powerful, righteous, and free Russian language!

The temerity to believe in nothing.

I’ve become convinced that every person should treat himself strictly and even rudely and distrustfully; it’s difficult to tame the beast in oneself.

Significance is sweet.

All human beings hang by a thread, an abyss may open under their feet at any moment, and yet they have to go and invent all sorts of difficulties for themselves and spoil their lives.

Art defies defeat by its very existence, representing the celebration of life, in spite of all attempts to degrade and destroy it.

Any time you can degrade or take away the top leadership of an organization, it’s a positive step forward.

Marriage is a very sacred institution and should not be degraded by allowing every other type of relationship to be made equivalent to it.

A wrong concept misleads the understanding; a wrong deed degrades the whole man, and may eventually demolish the structure of the human ego.

To conjure with the passive culture and adapt to its rules is to degrade and deny the fullness of our meaning and intention.

History is not a web woven with innocent hands. Among all the causes which degrade and demoralize men, power is the most constant and most active.

Man is not made better by being degraded; he is seldom restrained from crime by harsh measures, except the principle of fear predominates in his character; and then he is never made radically better for its influence.

The soul that is within me no man can degrade.