42 Quotes by Lev Shestov

After a tragedy, a farce. Philosophy enters into her power, and the earth returns under one's feet.

They certified that I was sane; but I know that I am mad." This confession gives us the key to what is most important and significant in Tolstoy's hidden life.

Although we had had no precise exponents of realism, yet after Pushkin it was impossible for a Russian writer to depart too far from actuality. Even those who did not know what to do with "real life" had to cope with it as best they could. Hence, in order that the picture of life should not prove too depressing, the writer must provide himself in due season with a philosophy.

If Darwin had seen in life what Dostoevsky saw, he would not have talked of the law of the preservation of species, but of its destruction.

Suffering "buys" something, and this something possesses a certain value for all of us, for common consciousness; by suffering we buy the right to judge.

Pushkin could cry hot tears, and he who can weep can hope. "I want to live, so that I may think and suffer," he says; and it seems as if the word "to suffer," which is so beautiful in the poem, just fell in accidentally, because there was no better rhyme in Russian for "to die.

Рассказывают, что какой-то математик, прослушавши музыкальную симфонию, спросил: «что она доказывает?» Разумеется, ничего не доказывает, кроме того, что у математика не было вкуса к музыке.

So long as the child was fed on its mother's milk, everything seemed to it smooth and easy. But when it had to give up milk and take to vodka, - and this is the inevitable law of human development - the childish suckling dreams receded into the realm of the irretrievable past.

But Dostoevsky does allow himself to ask just this very question: whether our reason has any right to judge between the possible and the impossible.