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Quotes by Russian Authors
"Suffering is the sole origin of consciousness."
"If you want to lose your faith, make friends with a priest."
"A good man can be stupid and still be good. But a bad man must have brains."
"I haven't understood a bar of music in my life, but I have felt it."
"Man only likes to count his troubles, but he does not count his joys."
"The end may justify the means as long as there is something that justifies the end."
"Injustice, poverty, slavery, ignorance - these may be cured by reform or revolution. But men do not live only by fighting evils. They live by positive goals, individual and collective, a vast variety of them, seldom predictable, at times incompatible."
"From being a patriotic myth, the Russian people have become an awful reality."
"The Universe is the periodical manifestation of this unknown Absolute Essence."
"All, everything that I understand, I understand only because I love."
"The trouble with music appreciation in general is that people are taught to have too much respect for music they should be taught to love it instead."
"Heretics are the only bitter remedy against the entropy of human thought."
"Let philosophy resolutely aim to be as scientific as possible, but let her not forget her strong kinship with literature."
"The more constraints one imposes, the more one frees one's self. And the arbitrariness of the constraint serves only to obtain precision of execution."
"Even the most wretched individual of our present society could not exist and develop without the cumulative social efforts of countless generations."
"Literature and philosophy both allow past idols to be resurrected with a frequency which would be truly distressing to a sober scientist."
"It is the function of science to discover the existence of a general reign of order in nature and to find the causes governing this order. And this refers in equal measure to the relations of man - social and political - and to the entire universe as a whole."
"Close contact between science and the practice of collective farms and State farms creates inexhaustible opportunities for the development of theoretical knowledge, enabling us to learn ever more and more about the nature of living bodies and the soil."
"How unbearable at times are people who are happy, people for whom everything works out."
"Say what you know, do what you must, come what may."
"It is impossible to be a mathematician without being a poet in soul."
"Love does not exist. There exists the physical need for intercourse, and the rational need for a mate in life."
"This open eye for possible alternatives which need to be scrutinized before we can determine which is the best grounded is profoundly disconcerting to all conservatives and to almost all revolutionaries."
"Even in our day, science suspects beyond the Polar seas, at the very circle of the Arctic Pole, the existence of a sea which never freezes and a continent which is ever green."
"For example, the opposition between acute and grave phonemes has the capacity to suggest an image of bright and dark, of pointed and rounded, of thin and thick, of light and heavy, etc."
"Ideas that enter the mind under fire remain there securely and for ever."
"Don't you have a machine that puts food into the mouth and pushes it down?"
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