People are so like their first mother Eve: what they are given doesn't take their fancy. The serpent is forever enticing them to come to him, to the tree of mystery. They must have the forbidden fruit, or paradise will not be paradise for them.

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I was not born to amuse the Tsars.

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My whole life has been pledged to this meeting with you...

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Better the illusions that exalt us than ten thousand truths.

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It's a lucky man who leaves early from life's banquet, before he's drained to the dregs his goblet - full of wine; yes, it's a lucky man who has not read life's novel to the end, but has been wise enough to part with it abruptly - like me with my Onegin.

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Play interests me very much," said Hermann: "but I am not in the position to sacrifice the necessary in the hope of winning the superfluous.

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He filled a shelf with a small army of books and read and read; but none of it made sense. .. They were all subject to various cramping limitations: those of the past were outdated, and those of the present were obsessed with the past.

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If you but knew the flames that burn in me which I attempt to beat down with my reason.

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Two fixed ideas can no more exist together in the moral world than two bodies can occupy one and the same place in the physical world.

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Dearer to me than a host of base truths is the illusion that exalts.

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