Farewell, my great one, my own, farewell, my pride, farewell, my swift, deep, dear river, how I loved your daylong splashing, how I loved to plunge into your cold waves.

Ecco che cos’era la vita, che cos’era l’esperienza, che cosa inseguivano coloro che andavano in cerca di avventure, ecco a che cosa mirava l’arte: ritornare a casa propria, ai propri affetti, riprendere la vita

Art always serves beauty, and beauty is the joy of possessing form, and form is the key to organic life since no living thing can exist without it.

The Mother of God is asked to ‘pray zealously to her Son and her God,’ and the words of the psalm are put into her mouth:’My soul doth magnify the Lord, and my spirit hath...

How intense can be the longing to escape from the emptiness and dullness of human verbosity, to take refuge in nature, apparently so inarticulate, or in the wordlessness of long, grinding labour, of sound sleep,...

You and I, it’s as though we have been taught to kiss in heaven and sent down to earth together, to see if we know what we were taught.

After two or three stanzas and several images by which he was himself astonished, his work took possession of him and he experienced the approach of what is called inspiration. At such moments the correlation...

But who are we, where do we come fromWhen all those yearsNothing but idle talk is leftAnd we are nowhere in the world?”= MEETING =

It´s a good thing when a man is different from your image of him. Is shows he isn´t a type. If he were, it would be the end of him as a man. But if...

Salvation lies not in the faithfulness to forms, but in the liberation from them.

The unforeseen is the most beautiful gift life can give us. That is what we must think of multiplying in our domain. That is what should have been talked about in this assembly, and no...

As for the men in power, they are so anxious to establish the myth of infallibility that they do their utmost to ignore truth.

I don’t like people who have never fallen or stumbled. Their virtue is lifeless and it isn’t of much value. Life hasn’t revealed its beauty to them.

When a great moment knocks on the door of your life, it is often no louder than the beating of your heart, and it is very easy to miss it.

It was partly the war, the revolution did the rest. The war was an artificial break in life– as if life could be put off for a time– what nonsense! The revolution broke out willy-nilly...

Everything established, settled, everything to do with home and order and the common ground, has crumbled into dust and has been swept away in the general upheaval and reorganization of the whole of society. The...

The great majority of us are required to live a constant, systematic duplicity. Your health is bound to be affected by it if, day after day, you say the opposite of what you feel, you...

I don’t think I could love you so much if you had nothing to complain of and nothing to regret. I don’t like people who have never fallen or stumbled. Their virtue is lifeless and...

About dreams. It is usually taken for granted that you dream of something that has made a particularly strong impression on you during the day, but it seems to me it´s just the contrary. Often...

They loved each other, not driven by necessity, by the “blaze of passion” often falsely ascribed to love. They loved each other because everything around them willed it, the trees and the clouds and the...

And so it turned out that only a life similar to the life of those around us, merging with it without a ripple, is genuine life, and that an unshared happiness is not happiness.

No single man makes history. History cannot be seen, just as one cannot see grass growing. Wars and revolutions, kings and Robespierres, are history’s organic agents, its yeast. But revolutions are made by fanatical men...

Literature is the art of discovering something extraordinary about ordinary people, and saying with ordinary words something extraordinary.

The saddest thing of all was that their party represented a deviation from the conditions of the time. It was impossible to imagine that in the houses across the lane people were eating and drinking...

February. Get ink, shed tears.Write of it, sob your heart out, sing,While torrential slush that roarsBurns in the blackness of the spring.Go hire a buggy. For six grivnas,Race through the noice of bells and wheelsTo...

There shall be no more death, Because we have already seen all that, Its old and we are tired of it, And now we need something new, And this new thing is Eternal Life

You said that facts are meaningless, unless meanings are put into them. Well, Christianity, the mystery of the individual, is precisely what must be put into the facts to make them meaningful.

Every herd is a refuge for giftlessness, whether it’s a faith in Soloviev, or Kant, or Marx. Only the solitary seek the truth, and they break with all those who don’t love it sufficiently.

Poetry is a rich, full-bodied whistle, cracked ice crunching in pails, the night that numbs the leaf, the duel of two nightingales, the sweet pea that has run wild, Creation’s tears in shoulder blades.

All mothers are mothers of great people, and it is not their fault that life later disappoints them.

No one makes history, no one sees it happen, no one sees the grass grow.

It seemed as if the valley were not always girded by woods, growing on the surrounding hills and facing away from the horizon, but the trees had only taken up their places now, rising out...

On one stretcher lay a man who had been mutilated in a particularly monstrous way. A large splinter from the shell that had mangled his face, turning his tongue and lips into a red gruel...

The last moments slipped by, one by one, irretrievable.

I am weary of this notion of faithfulness to a point of view at all cost. Life around us is ever changing, and I believe that one should try to change one’s slant accordingly—at least...

It’s good when a man deceives your expectations, when he doesn’t correspond to the preconceived notion of him. To belong to a type is the end of a man, his condemnation. If he doesn’t fall...

The rulers of your minds indulge in proverbs, but they’ve forgotten the main one, that love cannot be forced, and they have a deeply rooted habit of liberating people and making them happy, especially those...

How wonderful to be alive, he thought. But why does it always hurt?

And why is it, thought Lara, that my fate is to see everything and take it all so much to heart?

If it’s so painful to love and absorb electricity, how much more painful it is to be a woman, to be the electricity, to inspire love.

He realised, more vividly than ever before, that art had two constant, two unending preoccupations: it is always meditating upon death and it is always thereby creating life.

Reshaping life! People who can say that have never understood a thing about life—they have never felt its breath, its heartbeat—however much they have seen or done. They look on it as a lump of...