Quotes of All Topics . Occasions . Authors
Happiness doesn't depend on the actual number of blessings we manage to scratch from life, only our attitude towards them.
I think the gap between rich and poor is an extremely dangerous phenomenon and needs the immediate attention of the state.
Anything too far out of tune with our attitude is lost, either in the ears themselves or somewhere beyond, but it is lost.
Of course God is endlessly multi-dimensional so every religion that exists on earth represents some face, some side of God.
The demands of internal growth are incomparably more important to us...than the need for any external expansion of our power.
The foundation stones of a great building are destined to groan and be pressed upon; it is not for them to crown the edifice.
Own only what you can always carry with you: know languages, know countries, know people. Let your memory be your travel bag.
Human beings yield in many situations, even important and spiritual and central ones, as long as it prolongs one's well-being.
Prayers are like those appeals of ours. Either they don't get through or they're returned with 'rejected' scrawled across 'em.
Yes, you live with your feet in the mud and there's no time to be thinking about how you got in or how you're going to get out.
In every life there is one particular event that is decisive for the entire person-for his fate, his convictions, his passions.
In military science there is a principle more important than "Forward": it is that the task should be proportionate to the means.
I have always had that inner drive, since my birth. And I have always devoted myself gladly to work - to work and to the struggle.
The meaning of earthly existence lies not, as we have grown used to thinking, in prospering, but in the development of the soul...
The line dividing good and evil cuts through the heart of every human being. And who is willing to destroy a piece of his own heart?
Of course, my views developed in the course of time. But I have always believed in what I did and never acted against my conscience.
The "October Revolution" is a myth generated by the winners, the Bolsheviks, and swallowed whole by progressive circles in the West.
It is the artist who realizes that there is a supreme force above him and works gladly away as a small apprentice under God's heaven.
Was it Gorky who had said, "If your children are no better than you are, you have fathered them in vain, indeed you have lived in vain".
Only those who decline to scramble up the career ladder are interesting as human beings. Nothing is more boring than a man with a career.
Truth must be told-and things must change! If words are not about real things and do not cause things to happen, what is the good of them?
To his and everybody else's way of thinking, you should build a house with your own hands before you start talking about being an engineer.
One should not ascribe the evil deeds of individual leaders or political regimes to an innate fault of the Russian people and their country.
For a country to have a great writer is like having a second government. That is why no regime has ever loved great writers, only minor ones.
Hastiness and superficiality are the psychic diseases of the 20th century, and more than anywhere else this disease is reflected in the press.
If we look far into the future, one can see a time in the 21st century when both Europe and the USA will be in dire need of Russia as an ally.
I cannot suggest political ways out, that is the task of politicians, so it is simply that those who accuse me of this do not know how to read.
You can resolve to live your life with integrity. Let your credo be this: Let the lie come into the world, let it even triumph. But not through me.
I dare hope that all the peoples who have lived through communism will understand that communism is to blame for the bitter pages of their history.
Work was like a stick. It had two ends. When you worked for the knowing you gave them quality; when you worked for a fool you simply gave him eyewash.
You know the words from the Bible: 'Build not on sand, but on rock....' Tyrant leaders respect only firmness...and laugh at persons who give in to them.
Literature transmits incontrovertible condensed experience... from generation to generation. In this way literature becomes the living memory of a nation.
The timid civilized world has found nothing with which to oppose the onslaught of a sudden revival of barefaced barbarity, other than concessions and smiles.
Some are bound to die young. By dying young a person stays young in people's memory. If he burns brightly before he dies, his brightness shines for all time.
I refuse to see literature as amusement, as a game. I think that you ought not to approach literature without a moral responsibility for every word you write.
When I was in the gulag I would sometimes even write on stone walls. I used to write on scraps of paper, then I memorised the contents and destroyed the scraps.
There is something predetermined in the mutual attraction between Germany and Russia. Otherwise, this attraction would not have survived two ghastly World Wars.
Whenever the tissue of life is woven of legalistic relationships, this creates an atmosphere of spiritual mediocrity that paralyzes a person's noblest impulses.
We are all human, and our senses are quicker to prompt us than our reason. Every man gives off a scent, and that scent tells you how to act before your head does.
If decade after decade the truth cannot be told, each person's mind begins to roam irretrievably. One's fellow countrymen become harder to understand than Martians.
Communism will never be halted by negotiations or through the machinations of detente. It can only be halted by force from without or by disintegration from within.
The task must be to banish from mankind's thought the idea that anybody has the right to use force against righteousness, against justice, against mutual agreements.
I can say without affectation that I belong to the Russian convict world no less than I do to Russian literature. I got my education there, and it will last forever.
That which is called humanism, but what would be more correctly called irreligious anthropocentrism, cannot yield answers to the most essential questions of our life
The generation now coming out of Western schools is unable to distinguish good from bad. Even those words are unacceptable. This results in impaired thinking ability.
The Communists have for decades loudly proclaimed their goal of destroying the bourgeois world, while the West merely smiled at what seemed to be an extravagant joke.
I am of course confident that I will fulfill my tasks as a writer in all circumstances - from my grave even more successfully and more irrefutably than in my lifetime.
Not everything has a name. Some things lead us into a realm beyond words…By means of art were are sometimes sent - dimly, briefly - revelations unattainable by reason.
Each person has his special moment of life when he unfolded himself to the fullest, felt to the deepest, and expressed himself to the utmost, to himself and to others.
When Russia started to regain some of its strength as an economy and as a state, the West's reaction - perhaps a subconscious one, based on erstwhile fears - was panic.