Quote collection
433 quotes — follow a thought to its full quote page.
"I can't accept "our nervous age," since mankind has been nervous during every age. Whoever fears nervousness should turn into a sturgeon or smelt; if a sturgeon makes a stupid mistake, it can only be one: to end up on a hook, and then in a pan in a pastry shell."
"The more simply we look at ticklish questions, the more placid will be our lives and relationships."
"Why are we worn out? Why do we, who start out so passionate, brave, noble, believing, become totally bankrupt by the age of thirty or thirty-five? Why is it that one is extinguished by consumption, another puts a bullet in his head, a third seeks oblivion in vodka, cards, a fourth, in order to stifle fear and anguish, cynically tramples underfoot the portrait of his pure, beautiful youth? Why is it that, once fallen, we do not try to rise, and, having lost one thing, we do not seek another? Why?"
"Life is difficult for those who have the daring to first set out on an unknown road. The avant-garde always has a bad time of it."
"In order to cultivate yourself and to drop no lower than the level of the milieu in which you have landed, it is not enough to read Pickwick and memorize a monologue from Faust... You need to work continually day and night, to read ceaselessly, to study, to exercise your will... Each hour is precious."
"There is nothing more vulgar than a petty bourgeois life with its halfpence, its victuals, its futile talk, and its useless conventional virtue."
"I divide all literary works into two categories: Those I like and those I don't like. No other criterion exists for me."
"It's worth living abroad to study up on genteel and delicate manners. The maid smiles continuously; she smiles like a duchess on a stage, while at the same time it is clear from her face that she is exhausted from overwork."
"The more refined one is, the more unhappy."
"It's very hard, feeling that you're no more than a piece of unwanted furniture in this world."
"All saints have past and all sinners have a future."
"Even in Siberia there is happiness."
"I can only regard with bewilderment an educated man who is also religious"
"Let the things that happen on the stage be just as complex and yet just as simple as they are in life. For instance, people are having a meal, just having a meal, but at the same time their happiness is being created, or their lives are being smashed up."
"You only have to start a job of work to realize how few decent, honest folk there are about."
"When you live on cash, you understand the limits of the world around which you navigate each day. Credit leads into a desert with invisible boundaries."
"Critics are like horse-flies which hinder the horses in their plowing of the soil. The horse works, all its muscles drawn tight like the strings on a double-bass, and a fly settles on his flanks and tickles and buzzes. And what does the fly buzz about? It scarcely knows itself; simply because it is restless and wants to proclaim: 'Look, I too am living on the earth. See, I can buzz, too, buzz about anything.'"
"One must be a god to be able to tell successes from failures without making a mistake."
"In one-act pieces there should be only rubbish - that is their strength."
"To make a face from marble means to remove from the slab everything that is not the face"