Bazyl > Bazyl's Quotes

“Always forgive your enemies; nothing annoys them so much.”
― Oscar Wilde

“Two things are infinite: the universe and human stupidity; and I'm not sure about the universe.”
― Albert Einstein

“Be yourself; everyone else is already taken.”
― Oscar Wilde

“So many books, so little time.”
― Frank Zappa

“A room without books is like a body without a soul.”
― Marcus Tullius Cicero

“Be the change that you wish to see in the world.”
― Mahatma Gandhi

“To live is the rarest thing in the world. Most people exist, that is all.”
― Oscar Wilde

“Without music, life would be a mistake.”
― Friedrich Nietzsche, Twilight of the Idols

“All you need is love. But a little chocolate now and then doesn't hurt.”
― Charles M. Schulz

“I'm not afraid of death; I just don't want to be there when it happens.”
― Woody Allen

“Logic will get you from A to Z; imagination will get you everywhere.”
― Albert Einstein

“You don’t have a soul, Doctor. You are a soul. You have a body, temporarily.”
― Walter M. Miller Jr., A Canticle for Leibowitz

“manuscripts don't burn" - "(рукописи не горят)”
― Mikhail Bulgakov, The Master and Margarita

“Yes, man is mortal, but that would be only half the trouble. The worst of it is that he's sometimes unexpectedly mortal—there's the trick!”
― Mikhail Bulgakov, The Master and Margarita

“Is that vodka?" Margarita asked weakly.
The cat jumped up in his seat with indignation.
"I beg pardon, my queen," he rasped, "Would I ever allow myself to offer vodka to a lady? This is pure alcohol!”
― Mikhail Bulgakov, The Master and Margarita

“Punch a man on the nose, kick an old man downstairs, shoot somebody or any old thing like that, that’s my job. But argue with women in love—no thank you!”
― Mikhail Bulgakov, The Master and Margarita

“You are not Dostoevsky,' said the woman...
'You never can tell...' he answered.
'Dostoevsky is dead,' the woman said, a bit uncertainly.
'I protest!' he said with heat, 'Dostoevsky is immortal!”
― Mikhail Bulgakov, The Master and Margarita

“But here is a question that is troubling me: if there is no God, then, one may ask, who governs human life and, in general, the whole order of things on earth?
– Man governs it himself, – Homeless angrily hastened to reply to this admittedly none-too-clear question.
– Pardon me, – the stranger responded gently, – but in order to govern, one needs, after all, to have a precise plan for a certain, at least somewhat decent, length of time. Allow me to ask you, then, how can man govern, if he is not only deprived of the opportunity of making a plan for at least some ridiculously short period, well, say, a thousand years , but cannot even vouch for his own tomorrow? And in fact, – here the stranger turned to Berlioz, – imagine that you, for instance, start governing, giving orders to others and yourself, generally, so to speak, acquire a taste for it, and suddenly you get ...hem ... hem ... lung cancer ... – here the foreigner smiled sweetly, and if the thought of lung cancer gave him pleasure — yes, cancer — narrowing his eyes like a cat, he repeated the sonorous word —and so your governing is over! You are no longer interested in anyone’s fate but your own. Your family starts lying to you. Feeling that something is wrong, you rush to learned doctors, then to quacks, and sometimes to fortune-tellers as well. Like the first, so the second and third are completely senseless, as you understand. And it all ends tragically: a man who still recently thought he was governing something, suddenly winds up lying motionless in a wooden box, and the people around him, seeing that the man lying there is no longer good for anything, burn him in an oven. And sometimes it’s worse still: the man has just decided to go to Kislovodsk – here the foreigner squinted at Berlioz – a trifling matter, it seems, but even this he cannot accomplish, because suddenly, no one knows why, he slips and falls under a tram-car! Are you going to say it was he who governed himself that way? Would it not be more correct to think that he was governed by someone else entirely?”
― Mikhail Bulgakov, The Master and Margarita

“and a fact is the most stubborn thing in the world.”
― Mikhail Bulgakov, The Master and Margarita

“Margarita was never short of money. She could buy whatever she liked. Her husband had plenty of interesting friends. Margarita never had to cook. Margarita knew nothing of the horrors of living in a shared flat. In short... was she happy? Not for a moment.”
― Mikhail Bulgakov, The Master and Margarita

“Annushka has already bought the sunflower oil, and has not only bought it, but has already spilled it.”
― Mikhail Bulgakov, The Master and Margarita

“Manuscripts do not burn.”
― Mikhail Bulgakov, The Master and Margarita

“You were right," said the Master impressed by the neatness of Korovyov's work, "when you said: no documents, no person. So that means I don't exist since I don't have any documents.”
― Mikhail Bulgakov, The Master and Margarita

“In front of me 327 pages of the manuscript [Master and Margarita] (about 22 chapters). The most important remains - editing, and it's going to be hard. I will have to pay close attention to details. Maybe even re-write some things... 'What's its future?' you ask? I don't know. Possibly, you will store the manuscript in one of the drawers, next to my 'killed' plays, and occasionally it will be in your thoughts. Then again, you don't know the future. My own judgement of the book is already made and I think it truly deserves being hidden away in the darkness of some chest.

[Bulgakov from Moscow to his wife on June 15 1938]”
― Mikhail Bulgakov

“We act insane, because if we didn't, we would most surely become insane.
- Hawkeye”
― Richard Hooker, MASH: A Novel about Three Army Doctors