Physicians From Russia

"We old bachelors smell like dogs, do we? So be it. But I must take issue with your claim that doctors who treat female illnesses are womanizers and cynics at heart. Gynecologists deal with savage prose the likes of which you have never dreamed of."

"Satiation, like any state of vitality, always contains a degree of impudence, and that impudence emerges first and foremost when the sated man instructs the hungry one."

"Can words such as Orthodox, Jew, or Catholic really express some sort of exclusive personal virtues or merits?"

"An expansive life, one not constrained by four walls, requires as well an expansive pocket."

"When we retreat to the country, we are hiding not from people, but from our pride, which, in the city and among people, operates unfairly and immoderately."

"People understand God as the expression of the most lofty morality. Maybe He needs only perfect people."

"The wealthy man is not he who has money, but he who has the means to live in the luxurious state of early spring."

"There is nothing more vapid than a philistine petty bourgeois existence with its farthings, victuals, vacuous conversations, and useless conventional virtue."

"Despicable means used to achieve laudable goals render the goals themselves despicable."

"The more elevated a culture, the richer its language. The number of words and their combinations depends directly on a sum of conceptions and ideas; without the latter there can be no understandings, no definitions, and, as a result, no reason to enrich a language."

"The person who wants nothing, hopes for nothing, and fears nothing can never be an artist."

"Whoever sincerely believes that elevated and distant goals are as little use to man as a cow, that “all of our problems” come from such goals, is left to eat, drink, sleep, or, when he gets sick of that, to run up to a chest and smash his forehead on its corner."

"I abide by a rule concerning reviews: I will never ask, neither in writing nor in person, that a word be put in about my book.... One feels cleaner this way. When someone asks that his book be reviewed he risks running up against a vulgarity offensive to authorial sensibilities."

"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."

"It’s easier to write about Socrates than about a young woman or a cook."

"Prudence and justice tell me that in electricity and steam there is more love for man than in chastity and abstinence from meat."

"The air of one’s native country is the most healthy air."

"I would love to meet a philosopher like Nietzsche on a train or boat and to talk with him all night. Incidentally, I don’t consider his philosophy long-lived. It is not so much persuasive as full of bravura."

"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."

"Sports are positively essential. It is healthy to engage in sports, they are beautiful and liberal, liberal in the sense that nothing serves quite as well to integrate social classes, etc., than street or public games."

"By all means I will be married if you wish it. But on these conditions: everything must be as it has been hitherto—that is, she must live in Moscow while I live in the country, and I will come and see her. ... I promise to be an excellent husband, but give me a wife who, like the moon, will not appear every day in my sky."

"The bourgeoisie loves so-called “positive” types and novels with happy endings since they lull one into thinking that it is fine to simultaneously acquire capital and maintain one’s innocence, to be a beast and still be happy."

"A man who doesn’t drink is not, in my opinion, fully a man."

"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."

"Tell mother that however dogs and samovars might behave themselves, winter comes after summer, old age after youth, and misfortune follows happiness (or the other way around). A person can not be healthy and cheerful throughout life. Losses lie waiting and man can not safeguard against death, even if he be Alexander of Macedonia. One must be prepared for anything and consider everything to be inevitably essential, as sad as that may be."

"When a person expends the least amount of motion on one action, that is grace."

"There are in life such confluences of circumstances that render the reproach that we are not Voltaires most inopportune."

"I have no faith in our hypocritical, false, hysterical, uneducated and lazy intelligentsia when they suffer and complain: their oppression comes from within. I believe in individual people. I see salvation in discrete individuals, intellectuals and peasants, strewn hither and yon throughout Russia. They have the strength, although there are few of them."

"Women writers should write a lot if they want to write. Take the English women, for example. What amazing workers."

"Is it our job to judge? The gendarme, policemen and bureaucrats have been especially prepared by fate for that job. Our job is to write, and only to write."

"There are plenty of good people, but only a very, very few are precise and disciplined."

"You ask “What is life?” That is the same as asking “What is a carrot?” A carrot is a carrot and we know nothing more."

"Instructing in cures, therapists always recommend that “each case be individualized.” If this advice is followed, one becomes persuaded that those means recommended in textbooks as the best, means perfectly appropriate for the template case, turn out to be completely unsuitable in individual cases."

"When a person hasn’t in him that which is higher and stronger than all external influences, it is enough for him to catch a good cold in order to lose his equilibrium and begin to see an owl in every bird, to hear a dog’s bark in every sound."

"The wealthy are always surrounded by hangers-on; science and art are as well."

"If I were asked to choose between execution and life in prison I would, of course, chose the latter. It’s better to live somehow than not at all."

"Capital punishment kills immediately, whereas lifetime imprisonment does so slowly. Which executioner is more humane? The one who kills you in a few minutes, or the one who wrests your life from you in the course of many years?"

"The government is not God. It does not have the right to take away that which it can’t return even if it wants to."

"I’m in mourning for my life."

"Great Jove angry is no longer Jove."

"Но, я думаю, кто испытал наслаждение творчества, для того уже все другие наслаждения не существуют."

"I try to catch every sentence, every word you and I say, and quickly lock all these sentences and words away in my literary storehouse because they might come in handy."

"Do you remember you shot a seagull? A man came by chance, saw it and destroyed it, just to pass the time."

"It’s not a matter of old or new forms; a person writes without thinking about any forms, he writes because it flows freely from his soul."

"Как легко, доктор, быть философом на бумаге и как это трудно на деле!"

"People should be beautiful in every way—in their faces, in the way they dress, in their thoughts and in their innermost selves."

"In countries where there is a mild climate, less effort is expended on the struggle with nature and man is kinder and more gentle."

"Russian forests crash down under the axe, billions of trees are dying, the habitations of animals and birds are laid waste, rivers grow shallow and dry up, marvelous landscapes are disappearing forever.... Man is endowed with creativity in order to multiply that which has been given him; he has not created, but destroyed. There are fewer and fewer forests, rivers are drying up, wildlife has become extinct, the climate is ruined, and the earth is becoming ever poorer and uglier."

"The world perishes not from bandits and fires, but from hatred, hostility, and all these petty squabbles."

"Ah, but ignorance is better. At least then there's hope."