The forest does not change its place, we cannot lie in wait for it and catch it in the act of change. Whenever we look at it, it seems to be motionless. And such also is the immobility to our eyes of the eternally growing, ceaselessly changing history, the life of society moving invisibly in its incessant transformations.

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, so that duck and vodka, when they seem to be the only ones in town, are not even duck and vodka. And this was most vexing of all.

The town recluse whipping up his nerves and his imagination with strong black coffee and tobacco doesn't know the strongest drug of all-good health and real necessity.

"So many new thoughts come into your head when your hands are busy with hard physical work, when your mind has set you a task that can be achieved by physical effort and that brings its reward in joy and success, when for six hours on end you dig or hammer, scorched by the life-giving breath of the sky.

"Another thing is that I am obsessed by the problem of mimicry, the outward adaptation of an organism to the color of its environment. I think this biological phenomenon can cast light on the problem of the relationship between the inward and the outward world.

He longed to shout to him and to the people in the railway coach that salvation lay not in loyalty to forms but in throwing them off.

You are anxious about whether you will rise from the dead or not, but you rose from the dead when you were born and you didn't notice it.

With respect to the care of the workers, the protection of the mother, the struggle against the power of money, our revolutionary era is a wonder, unforgettable era of new, permanent achievements, but as regards its interpretation of life and the philosophy of happiness that is being propagated, it's simply impossible to believe that it is meant to

More vividly than ever before he realized that art has two constant, two unending concerns: it always meditates on death and thus always creates life. All great, genuine art resembles and continues the Revelation of St. John.