noianon

“At first, Véra and I were delighted by reading [Borges]. We felt we were on a portico, but we have learned that there was no house.”
― Vladimir Nabokov

“Dostoevski's lack of taste, his monotonous dealings with persons suffering with pre-Freudian complexes, the way he has of wallowing in the tragic misadventures of human dignity—all this is difficult to admire. I do not like this trick his characters have of "sinning their way to Jesus" or, as a Russian author Ivan Bunin put it more bluntly, "spilling Jesus all over the place.”
― Vladimir Nabokov, Lectures on Russian Literature

“In religion I do not see the mystery of the Incarnation, but the mystery of the social order. It associates with Heaven an idea of equality that keeps rich men from being massacred by the poor…Society is impossible without inequality, inequality intolerable without a code of morality, and a code of morality unacceptable without religion.”
― Napoléon Bonaparte

“Le stoïcisme, religion qui n'a qu'un sacrement : le suicide !”
― Charles Baudelaire, Intimate Journals