No matter how often you knock at nature's door, she won't answer in words you can understand--for Nature is dumb. She'll vibrate and moan like a violin, but you mustn't expect a song.

No matter how often you knock at nature's door, she won't answer in words you can understand--for Nature is dumb. She'll vibrate and moan like a violin, but you mustn't expect a song.

So long as one's just dreaming about what to do, one can soar like an eagle and move mountains, it seems, but as soon as one starts doing it one gets worn out and tired.

There's something tragic in the fate of almost every person--it's just that the tragic is often concealed from a person by the banal surface of life.... A woman will complain of indigestion and not even know that what she means is that her whole life has been shattered.

We Russians have assigned ourselves no other task in life but the cultivation of our own personalities, and when we're barely past childhood, we set to work to cultivate them, those unfortunate personalities.

Don't force me into saying what I don't want to say, and what I won't say.

In the end, nature is inexorable: it has no reason to hurry and, sooner or later, it takes what belongs to it. Unconsciously and inflexibly obedient to its own laws, it doesn't know art, just as it doesn't know freedom, just as it doesn't know goodness.