If ever my life can be of any use to you, come and claim it.

Reason and justice tell me there's more love for humanity in electricity and steam than in chastity and vegetarianism.

To believe in God is not hard. Inquisitors, Byron and Arakcheev believed in Him. No, believe in man!

One can prove or refute anything at all with words. Soon people will perfect language technology to such an extent that they'll be proving with mathematical precision that twice two is seven.

Humankind has understood history as a series of battles because, to this day, it regards conflict as the central facet of life.

I feel more confident and more satisfied when I reflect that I have two professions and not one. Medicine is my lawful wife and literature is my mistress. When I get tired of one I spend the night with the other. Though it's disorderly it's not so dull, and besides, neither really loses anything, through my infidelity.

When describing nature, a writer should seize upon small details, arranging them so that the reader will see an image in his mind after he closes his eyes. For instance: you will capture the truth of a moonlit night if you'll write that a gleam like starlight shone from the pieces of a broken bottle, and then the dark, plump shadow of a dog or wolf appeared. You will bring life to nature only if you don't shrink from similes that liken its activities to those of humankind.