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

When man finds in himself a certain defect, of which he can by no means rid himself, there remains but to accept the so-called failing as a natural quality. The more grave and important the defect, the more urgent is the need to ennoble it.

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.

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.

If he tells the truth, it is because the most reeking lie no longer intoxicates him, even though he swallow it not in the modest doses that idealism offers, but in immoderate quantities, thousand-gallon-barrel gulps. He would taste the bitterness, but it would not make his head turn, as it does Schiller’s, or Dostoevsky’s, or even Socrates’, whose head, as we know, could stand any quantity of wine, but went spinning with the most commonplace lie.

The thing to do is to go on, in the same suave tone, from uttering a series of banalities to expressing a new and dangerous thought, without any break. If you succeed in this, the business is done. The reader will not forget – the new words will plague and torment him until he has accepted them.

Once an idea is there, the gates must be opened to it.

Count Tolstoy preached inaction. It seems he had no need. We “inact” remarkably. Idleness, just that idleness Tolstoy dreamed of, a free, conscious idling that despises labour, this is one of the chief characteristics of our time.

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.

Objectionable, tedious, irritating labour, – this is the condition of genius, which no doubt explains the reason why men so rarely achieve anything. Genius must submit to cultivate an ass within itself – the condition being so humiliating that man will seldom take up the job.