It is not good to be sick, and it is even worse to die, but the worst thing is to be sick and die thinking that nothing will be left behind you in the world.
There is nothing more dangerous than tying your fate to the fate of a woman just because she is young and beautiful.
There is nothing more sacred and selfless than a mother's love; every affection, every love, every passion is either weak, or has an interest, in comparison with it.
It is no crime to love several times in life, and no merit to love only once: to reproach yourself for the first and to boast of the second is equally absurd.
There is no man so bad that an effective education cannot make him good.
No person in the world is born fully formed, that is, fully formed, but any vine is nothing but a permanent development, a continuous formation.
The moral education of children must be negative, that is, it must consist in the elimination of any bad examples and in the development in them of the sense of love, justice and humanity, not through moral rules, but through the force of example.
Society finds in literature its real life, elevated to an ideal.
One of the highest principles of true morality is respect for human dignity in every human being without distinction.
The instrument and intermediary of education must be love, and the goal must be humanity.
The father loves his child, because he is his creation; but he must also love him as a future man. Only such love towards children is true and worthy to be called love; anything else is selfishness, cold self-love.
Anyone's patriotism is proven not by words but by deeds.
In my firm opinion, a marriage union should not be public, as it concerns only the two of them and no one else.
Villains succeed in their pursuits because they do to honest men as they do to villains, and honest men do to villains as they do to honest men.
The concept of progress as the source and goal of historical movement...must be a direct and immediate conclusion springing from the vision of the people and mankind conceived as ideal embodiments.
The vocation of woman is to instill in man energy of soul, the ardor of noble passions, and to preserve in him a sense of duty and aspiration to the sublime and holy—this is the remarkable and sacred vocation of woman.
Poetry is the highest kind of art. Any other kind of art is more or less constrained and limited in its creative activity to the material through which it manifests itself. And poetry is expressed by free creative word, which is also sound and image and idea defined and clearly pronounced. Therefore, poetry includes all the elements of other art genres.
Let a child play tricks only if they are not harmful and do not leave a mark on his physical and morale.
All men drink and eat, but only the savages get drunk and eat like pigs.
Reason is given to man in order that he may live rationally, and not merely to make him see that he lives rashly.
Reason and feeling are the two forces which need each other equally, and which, without each other, are dead and unimportant.
Rational education makes bad nature less bad, even better, develops to a certain extent even the weakest qualities, and humanizes even the most limited and superficial nature.
The heart has its laws, even if it is not easy to form a completely systematized code from them.
A word reflects an idea: if an idea is not clear, it means that the word is not clear.
Laughter is often an important tool for distinguishing truth from lies.
Nature creates man, but society develops and forms him.
It is impossible to create a language because it is created by the people; philologists only discover the laws and systematize them, and writers only create within it according to these laws.
What do I care how the simple man lives, if a personality suffers? What do I care that a genius on earth lives as in heaven, when the crowd lies in the mire?
Creativity is a great gift of nature; an act of creation in a creative soul is a great mystery; the moment of creation is a sacred moment.
Passion is the poetry and flower of life, but what would be the point of passions if there is no will in the heart.