For broad understanding and deep feeling, you need pain and suffering.

Man is a creative animal, doomed to strive toward a goal, engaged in full-time engineering.

One could never judge a man without seeing him close, for oneself.

If there is no God, then I am God.

And you're sorry that the ephemeral beauty has faded so rapidly, so irretrievably, that it flashed so deceptively and pointlessly before your eyes - you're sorry, for you didn't even have time to fall in love.

This pleasure comes precisely from the sharpest awareness of your own degradation; from the knowledge that you have gone to the utmost limit; that it is despicable, yet cannot be otherwise; that you no longer have any way out; that you will never become a different man.

The Russian soul is a dark place.