Personality and mind, like moustaches, belong to a certain age. They are a deformity in a child.... Leave his sensibilities, his emotions, his spirit, and his mind severely alone. There is the devil in mothers, that they must provoke personalresponse from their infants.

Never trust the artist. Trust the tale. The proper function of the critic is to save the tale from the artist who created it.

Men are not free when they're doing just what they like. Men are only free when they're doing what the deepest self likes. And there is getting down to the deepest self! It takes some diving.

One man isn't any better than another, not because they are equal, but because they are intrinsically other, that there is no termof comparison.

At the back of my life's horizon, where the dreamings of past lives crowd.

That is almost the whole of Russian literature: the phenomenal coruscations of the souls of quite commonplace people.

And this is the final meaning of work: the extension of human consciousness. The lesser meaning of work is the achieving of self-preservation.