The contemplation of beauty, whether it be a uniquely tinted sunset, a radiant face, or a work of art, makes us glance back unwittingly at our personal past and juxtapose ourselves and our inner being with the utterly unattainable beauty revealed to us.

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The good, the admirable reader identifies himself not with the boy or the girl in the book, but with the mind that conceived and composed that book.

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Our imagination flies -- we are its shadow on the earth.

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Toska - noun /ˈtō-skə/ - Russian word roughly translated as sadness, melancholia, lugubriousness. "No single word in English renders all the shades of toska. At its deepest and most painful, it is a sensation of great spiritual anguish, often without any specific cause. At less morbid levels it is a dull ache of the soul, a longing with nothing to long for, a sick pining, a vague restlessness, mental throes, yearning. In particular cases it may be the desire for somebody of something specific, nostalgia, love-sickness. At the lowest level it grades into ennui, boredom.

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Play! Invent the world! Invent reality!

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We live not only in a world of thoughts, but also in a world of things. Words without experience are meaningless.

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Do not be angry with the rain; it simply does not know how to fall upwards.

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Curiosity is insubordination in its purest form.

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For I do not exist: there exist but the thousands of mirrors that reflect me. With every acquaintance I make, the population of phantoms resembling me increases. Somewhere they live, somewhere they multiply. I alone do not exist.

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Nostalgia in reverse, the longing for yet another strange land, grew especially strong in spring.

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