Top 30 Quotes & Sayings by Leonid Andreyev

The only thing not worth destroying is science. That would be useless. Science is unchangeable, and if you destroyed it today, it would rise up again the same as before.

All perishes, all decays, all is born again.

What worse can happen to a man than to have been born? It's like asking a man who is drowning whether he is not afraid of getting wet.

Ah well, 'tis the way of the world -- births and deaths, births and deaths.

Do you not see the hand of God, which gives harmony, light, and love to the world? Do not the mountains, in the blue cloud of incense, sing their hymn of glory?

Only the footsteps of the blind are short, but their thoughts are long.

Hitherto without being; hidden away in the womb of eternity; possessed neither of thought nor feeling; remote from the range of human ken -- the Man bursts, in some unknown manner, the bars of non-existence, and announces with a cry the beginning of his brief life. In the night of non-existence there bursts forth also a little candle, lit by an unseen hand. Mark well its flame: for it is the life of that Man.

Thus will we deal with life, my little help-meet. Will we not, eh? What though it blink at us like an owl that is blinded by the sun, we will yet force it to smile.

The loss of reason seems to me honorable, like the death of a sentry at his post.

When a man has the rope about his neck, you don't ask him about his health!

It's a powerful instrument, dynamite -- nothing like it for a convincing argument!

Wisdom and folly are equal before the face of Infinity, for Infinity knows them not.

Man dies. Come from darkness, into darkness he returns, and is reabsorbed, without a trace left, into the illimitable void of time.

Don't laugh at the voice of the stars. They are far away, their rays are light and pale, and we can barely see their sleeping shadows, but their sorcery is stern and dark.

When a woman weeps, it is a man's shame.

Men are always murderers, and their calmness and generosity is the calmness of a well-fed animal, that knows itself out of danger.

There is no beast more cruel than man.

To succeed in life one needs two things -- influence and a lucky star.

The moon was so young, so strange, even as a young girl who is dreaming and is afraid to tell her dreams; and it was shining only for itself.

Born, the Man assumes the name and image of humanity, and becomes in all things like unto other men who dwell upon the earth. Their hard lot becomes his, and his, in turn, becomes the lot of all who shall come after him. Drawn on inexorably by time, it is not given him to see the next rung on which his faltering foot shall fall. Bounded in knowledge, it is not given him to foretell what each succeeding hour, what each succeeding minute, shall have in store for him. In blind nescience, in an agony of foreboding, in a whirl of hopes and fears, he completes the cycle of an iron destiny.

Who is all-powerful in the world? Who is most dreadful in the world? The machine. Who is most fair, most wealthy, and all-wise? The machine. What is the earth? A machine. What is the sky? A machine. What is man? A machine. A machine.

Only the dead know the truth.

Bread without love is like grass without salt -- the stomach may be filled, but it leaves a bad taste in the mouth.

The papers are full of murders -- strange murders. It is all nonsense that there are as many brains as there are men; mankind has only one intellect, and it is beginning to get muddled.

Who strikes man with love -- God or the Devil?

I cannot get accustomed to war; my brain refuses to understand and explain a thing that is senseless in its basis. Millions of people gather at one place and, giving their actions order and regularity, kill each other, and it hurts everybody equally, and all are unhappy -- what is it if not madness?

I want to be the apostle of self destruction. I want my book to affect man's reason, his emotions, his nerves, his whole animal nature. I should like my book to make people turn pale with horror as they read it, to affect them like a drug, like a terrifying dream, to drive them mad, to make them curse and hate me but still to read me.

See thou, whatsoever be thy name -- whether Fate, Life, or Devil! I cast thee down my gauntlet, I challenge thee to battle! Men of faint heart may bow before thy mysterious power, thy face of stone may inspire them with dread, in thy unbroken silence they may discern the birth of calamity and an impending avalanche of woe. But I am daring and strong, and I challenge thee to battle! Let us draw our swords, and join our bucklers, and rain such blows upon each other's crests as shall cause the very earth to shake again! Ha! Come forth and fight with me!

Death augments distance and dulls the memory. Death reconciles.

As we educate a child -- removing out of its path those obstacles over which we ourselves, in early days, have stumbled, and strengthening its mind with the aid of our own matured experience -- we, as it were, construct a new and better replica of ourselves, and thus enable the race to move slowly, but surely, forward towards the ultimate goal of existence -- towards perfection.