Art is not a pleasure, a solace, or an amusement; art is a great matter. Art is an organ of human life, transmitting man’s reasonable perception into feeling.
He stepped down, trying not to look long at her, as if she were the sun, yet he saw her, like the sun, even without looking.
Rummaging in our souls, we often dig up something that ought to have lain there unnoticed.
The actions of men are subject to general immutable laws expressed in statistics.
All the variety, all the charm, all the beauty of life is made up of light and shadow.
All his life Alexey Alexandrovitch had lived and worked in official spheres, having to do with the reflection of life. And every time he had stumbled against life itself he had shrunk away from it. Now he experienced a feeling akin to that of a man who, while calmly crossing a precipice by a bridge, should suddenly discover that the bridge is broken and that there is a chasm below. That chasm was life itself, the bridge that artificial life in which Alexey Alexandrovitch had lived.
In the upper, rich, more educated classes of European society doubt arose as to the truth of that understanding of life which was expressed by Church Christianity. When, after the Crusades and the maximum development of papal power and its abuses, people of the rich classes became acquainted with the wisdom of the classics and saw, on the one hand, the reasonable lucidity of the teachings of the ancient sages, and on the other hand, the incompatibility of the Church doctrine with the teaching of Christ, they found it impossible to continue to believe the Church teaching.
In order to correctly define art, it is necessary, first of all, to cease to consider it as a means to pleasure and consider it as one of the conditions of human life. Reflecting on it in this way, we cannot fail to observe that art is one of the means of effective communication between people.
Nowhere nor in anything, except in the assertion of the Church, can we find that God or Christ founded anything like what churchmen understand by the Church.
In historic events, the so-called great men are labels giving names to events, and like labels they have but the smallest connection with the event itself. Every act of theirs, which appears to them an act of their own will, is in a historical sense involuntary and is related to the whole course of history and predestined from eternity.
I know that most men — not only those considered clever, but even those who are very clever and capable of understanding most difficult scientific, mathematical, or philosophic, problems — can seldom discern even the simplest and most obvious truth if it is such as obliges them to admit the falsity of conclusions they have formed, perhaps with much difficulty — conclusions of which they are proud, which they have taught to others, and on which they have built their lives.
Though it is possible to utter words only with the intention to fulfill the will of God, it is very difficult not to think about the impression that they will produce on men and not to form them accordingly. But deeds you can do quite unknown to men, only for God. And such deeds are the greatest joy that a man can experience.
The business of art lies just in this, to make that understood and felt which, in the form of an argument, might be incomprehensible and inaccessible.
You’ve said nothing, of course, and I ask nothing,” he was saying; “but you know that friendship’s not what I want: that there’s only one happiness in life for me, that word that you dislike so…yes, love!…
Art lifts man from his personal life into the universal life.
A real mother, who knows the will of God by experience, will prepare her children also to fulfill it. Such a mother will suffer if she sees her child overfed, effeminate, and dressed up, for she knows that these things will make it difficult for it to fulfill the will of God that she recognizes.
Each man lives for himself, uses his freedom to achieve his personal goals, and feels with his whole being that right now he can or cannot do such-and-such an action; but as soon as he does it, this action, committed at a certain moment in time, becomes irreversible, and makes itself the property of history, in which is has not a free but a predestined significance.
Slavery results from laws, laws are made by governments, and, therefore people can only be freed from slavery by the abolition of governments. And it is time for people to understand that governments not only are not necessary but are harmful and most highly immoral institutions, in which a self-respecting, honest man cannot and must not take part.
My principal sin is doubt. I doubt everything and am in doubt most of the time.
That only shows you have no heart,’ she said. But her eyes said that she knew he had a heart, and that was why she was afraid of him
If people tell you that you should live your life preparing for the future, do not believe them. Real Life is found only in the present.
The positivist philosophy of Comte and the I doctrine deduced from it that humanity is an organism, and Darwin’s doctrine of a law of the struggle for existence that is supposed to govern life, with the differentiation of various breeds of people which follows from it, and the anthropology, biology, and sociology of which people are now so fond-all have the same aim. These have all become favorite sciences because they serve to justify the way in which people free themselves from the human obligation to labour, while consuming the fruits of other people’s labor.
Memento mori—remember death! These are important words. If we kept in mind that we will soon inevitably die, our lives would be completely different. If a person knows that he will die in a half-hour, he certainly will not bother doing trivial, stupid, or, especially, bad things during this half-hour. Perhaps you have half a century before you die—what makes this any different from a half-hour?
Absolute continuity of motion is not comprehensible to the human mind. Laws of motion of any kind become comprehensible to man only when he examines arbitrarily selected elements of that motion; but at the same time, a large proportion of human error comes from the arbitrary division of continuous motion into discontinuous elements.
The most difficult subjects can be explained to the most slow-witted man if he has not formed any idea of them already; but the simplest thing cannot be made clear to the most intelligent man if he is firmly persuaded that he knows already, without a shadow of a doubt, what is laid before him.
What am I coming for?” he repeated, looking straight into her eyes. “You know that I have come to be where you are,” he said; “I can’t help it.
I think… if it is true that there are as many minds as there are heads, then there are as many kinds of love as there are hearts.
And so the arbitrary union of three incommensurate, mutually disconnected concepts became the basis of a bewildering theory… [by which] one of the lowest renderings of art, art for mere pleasure — against which all of the master teachers warned — was idealized as the ultimate in art.