I have no faith in our hypocritical, false, hysterical, uneducated and lazy intelligentsia when they suffer and complain: their oppression comes from within. I believe in individual people. I see salvation in discrete individuals, intellectuals and peasants, strewn hither and yon throughout Russia. They have the strength, although there are few of them.
Thought and beauty, like a hurricane or waves, should not know conventional, delimited forms.
I have in my head a whole army of people pleading to be let out and awaiting my commands.
Man will only become better when you make him see what he is like.
We learn about life not from pluses alone, but from minuses as well.
The wealthy man is not he who has money, but he who has the means to live in the luxurious state of early spring.
Capital punishment kills immediately, whereas lifetime imprisonment does so slowly. Which executioner is more humane? The one who kills you in a few minutes, or the one who wrests your life from you in the course of many years?
People who live alone always have something on their minds that they would willingly share.
Probably nature itself gave man the ability to lie so that in difficult and tense moments he could protect his nest, just as do the vixen and wild duck.
It doesn't matter that your painting is small. Kopecks are also small, but when a lot are put together they make a ruble. Each painting displayed in a gallery and each good book that makes it into a library, no matter how small they may be, serve a great cause: accretion of the national wealth.