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"I clearly understand, first, that the real human being is a poet and, second, that [the tyrant] is the incarnate negation of a poet."
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"Let each person decide his or her fate."

"Beauty, love with truth, that is all there is."

"Can any man sacrifice is life for his fellow man?"

"Life cannot be exchange for anything."

"Beauty is the brightness of being."

"The voice says, maybe you don't go to hell for the things you do. Maybe you go to hell for the things you don't do. The things you don't finish."

"The philosophy of a person speaks of what dictates or governs how and what someone believes."

"There is more things in heaven and earth...than are dreamt of by your philosophy."

"There are more things in heaven and earth...than are dreamt of by your philosophy."

"HELLO! Look at me. HELLO! I am so ZEN. This is BLOOD. This is NOTHING. Hello. Everything is nothing, and it's so cool to be ENLIGHTENED. Like me."
Explore more quotes by Vladimir Nabokov


"The kind of poem I produced in those days was hardly anything more than a sign I made of being alive, of passing or having passed, or hoping to pass, through certain intense human emotions. It was a phenomenon of orientation rather than of art, thus comparable to stripes of paint on a roadside rock or to a pillared heap of stones marking a mountain trail. But then, in a sense, all poetry is positional: to try to express one's position in regard to the universe embraced by consciousness, is an immemorial urge. Tentacles, not wings, are Apollo's natural members. Vivian Bloodmark, a philosophical friend of mine, in later years, used to say that while the scientist sees everything that happens in one point of space, the poet feels everything that happens in one point of time."


"That human life is but a first installment of the serial soul and that one's individual secret is not lost in the process of earthly dissolution, becomes something more than an optimistic conjecture, and even more than a matter of religious faith, when we remember that only commonsense rules immortality out."


"The idea of God was invented in the small hours of history by a scam who had genius; it somehow reeks too much of humanity, that idea, to make its azure origin plausible..."


"And I thought to myself how those fast little articles forget everything, everything, while we, old lovers, treasure every inch of their nymphancy."


"Cannot it actually be that in a wildly literal sense, unacceptable to one's reason, he meant disappearing in his art, dissolving in his verse, thus leaving of himself, of his nebulous person, nothing but verse?"


"His life was a constant war with insensate objects that fell apart, or attacked him, or refused to function, or viciously got themselves lost as soon as they entered the sphere of his existence."


"I discovered in nature the non utilitarian delights that I sought in art. Both were a form of magic, both were a game of intricate enchantment and deception."
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