A withered maple leaf has left its branch and is falling to the ground; its movements resemble those of a butterfly in flight. Isn't it strange? The ….

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..

If we wait for the moment when everything, absolutely everything is ready, we shall never begin..

Nothing is worse and more hurtful than a happiness that comes too late..

Love isn't actually a feeling at all--it's an illness, a certain condition of body and soul.... Usually it takes possession of someone without his pe….

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

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..

To desire and expect nothing for oneself and to have profound sympathy for others is genuine holiness..

Circumstances define us; they force us onto one road or another, and then they punish us for it..

The temerity to believe in nothing..

Most people can't understand how others can blow their noses differently than they do..

The fact is that previously they were simply dunces and now they've suddenly become nihilists..

I don't see why it's impossible to express everything that's on one's mind..

Sternly, remorselessly, fate guides each of us; only at the beginning, when we're absorbed in details, in all sorts of nonsense, in ourselves, are we….

Whereas I think: I’m lying here in a haystack... The tiny space I occupy is so infinitesimal in comparison with the rest of space, which I don’t occu….

It was only the vulgarly mediocre that repelled her..

Life deceives everyone except the individual who doesn't contemplate it, the individual who demands nothing from it, the individual who serenely acce….

Art, if one employs this term in the broad sense that includes poetry within its realm, is an art of creation laden with ideals, located at the very ….

I must say, though, that a man who has staked his whole life on the card of a woman's love and who, when that card is trumped, falls to pieces and le….

As for work, without it, without painstaking work, any writer or artist definitely remains a dilettante; there's no point in waiting for so-called bl….

Illness isn't the only thing that spoils the appetite..