The highly complex, almost mathematical, nature of music creates for it an ironclad protection against the microbes of dilletantism, which penetrate much more easily into the fields of painting, literature, and the theater.

When we remove the snowdrift piled up over Chekhov in recent years, we uncover a man profoundly agitated by social problems; a writer whose social ideals are the same as those we live by; a philosophy of the divinity of man, of fervent faith in man - the faith that moves mountains.

We have long become overgrown with calluses; we no longer hear people being killed. ("X")

Now I no longer live in our clear, rational world; I live in the ancient nightmare world, the world of square roots of minus one.

Those two, in paradise, were given a choice: happiness without freedom, or freedom without happiness. There was no third alternative.

The most wonderful thing in life is to be delirious and the most wonderful kind of delirium is being in love. In the morning mist, hazy and amorous, London was delirious. London squinted as it floated along, milky pink, without caring where it was going.

There is no joy nobler than suffering for the sake of love for man.