Faith is an aptitude of the spirit. It is, in fact, a talent: you must be born with it.

Without a knowledge of languages you feel as if you don't have a passport.

To live simply to die is by no means amusing, but to live with the knowledge that you will die before your time, that's really is idiotic

How unbearable at times are people who are happy, people for whom everything works out.

I agree that one can't dispense with the reins and the whip altogether, for knaves find their way even into literature, but no thinking will discover a better police for literature than the critics and the author's own conscience.

The time's come: there's a terrific thunder-cloud advancing upon us, a mighty storm is coming to freshen us up....It's going to blow away all this idleness and indifference, and prejudice against work....I'm going to work, and in twenty-five or thirty years' time every man and woman will be working.

Cross out as many adjectives and adverbs as you can. ... It is comprehensible when I write: "The man sat on the grass," because it is clear and does not detain one's attention. On the other hand, it is difficult to figure out and hard on the brain if I write: "The tall, narrow-chested man of medium height and with a red beard sat down on the green grass that had already been trampled down by the pedestrians, sat down silently, looking around timidly and fearfully." The brain can't grasp all that at once, and art must be grasped at once, instantaneously.