“However much you knock at nature’s door, she will never answer you in comprehensible words.”

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.

Ah, but in time the heat of noontide passes, and to it there succeed nightfall and dusk, with a return to the quiet fold where for the weary an the heavy-laden there waits sleep, sweet sleep.

I share no man’s opinions; I have my own.

The bewildered soul can answer only: “Since I do not understand ‘Who I am,’ I only know what I am not.” The corollary of this emotional incertitude is snobbism, intolerance and racial hate.

If I’m educated and passionate about a topic, I’ll answer the question. But I also know when to shut the hell up.

How can one come to possess great faith? Now listen, here is the answer to that: First, the blade, then the ear, then the full corn in the ear. Faith must grow by soil, moisture, and exercise.

If you have a problem with my answer that’s your problem, not my problem.

We wander, question. But the answer waits in each separate heart – the answer of our own identity and the way by which we can master loneliness and feel that at last we belong.

Mike Huckabee says the answer to our problems is to cure all diseases. I guess no one’s thought of that before.

Rich and successful people are solution-oriented; they spend their time and energy strategizing and planning the answers to challenges that come up, and creating systems to make certain that problem doesn’t occur again.

[To a woman whose cellphone rang during a formal meeting:] You’d better answer that. It could be someone important.