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..Sleep, the most precious of all things..

..Sleep, that most precious of all things.

And yet there exist other kinds of adventures and other kinds of adventurers: people less active, more pensive and reflective types, who discover — and invent — adventures in quiet library alcoves, down back alleys, on barstools, in front of the fire, in their interior life; maybe with a donkey somewhere, going slow…

Sometimes words say too much; they are the source of misunderstanding, of emptiness. Better to listen to the birds and the buzzing insects, to the crickets, hidden and in hiding, to the song of natural silence so difficult to find in our age.

You reach the point sometimes when something has got to change, when something has got to give, when the world everybody revels in seems all wrong to you, when it's hard for you to function in it anymore. You feel underwhelmed, disappointed by what's there, feel the need to step back, to take a look at yourself...
This is a very hard thing to do: escaping before it's too late.

Absolute reality belongs to dreams and not to life.

All looked distant and peaceful and strange.

Men who are not free, he thought, always idealise their bondage.

How intense can be the longing to escape from the emptiness and dullness of human verbosity, to take refuge in nature, apparently so inarticulate, or in the wordlessness of long, grinding labour, of sound sleep, of true music, or of human understanding rendered speechless by emotion !

Life is the farce we all have to lead.

I wrote silences, I wrote the night. I recorded the inexpressible. I fixed frenzies in their flight.

As for me, my life is not heavy enough, it flies and floats far above action, that precious focus of the world.

So the sea roared when there was neither Yalta nor Oreanda, and so it roars and will roar, dully, indifferently when we shall be no more. And in this continual indifference to the life and death of each of us lives pent up the pledge of our eternal salvation, of the uninterrupted movement of life on earth and its unceasing perfection.

And when the blessed mist, which the heart wraps about reason, fades away from time to time, reflection makes her lose her illusions.

The slow creation of long interchanging influences...

But to most mortals there is a stupidity which is unendurable and a stupidity which is altogether acceptable --else, indeed, what would become of social bonds?

For time, like money, is measured by our needs.

The river, though it flowed so slowly, had still a sense of movement and it gave one a melancholy feeling of the transitoriness of things. Everything passed, and what trace of its passage remained?

When all things lasted so short a time and nothing mattered very much, it seemed pitiful that men, attaching an absurd importance to trivial objects, should make themselves and one another so unhappy.

Indeed the self is a sacred place, there is no point in traveling to other lands.

It is said that the senses are highly developed. But the mind is higher than the senses, and the intellect higher than the mind; that which is higher than the intellect is he (the self).

Yet for all that every fiber of my body tingled with ecstatsy. I felt somehow happy to be so high above the world - a childish feeling, I grant, but we can't help becoming children as we leave social conventions behind and come nearer to nature. All life's experience is shed from us and the soul becomes anew what it once was and will surely be again.

Russia was reality and at once the deep, daily perceiving that reality is something distant that comes infinitely slowly to those who have patience. Russia, the land where people are solitary people, each with a world in himself, each full of darkness like a mountain, each deep in his humility, without fear of abasing himself, and therefore reverent. People full of distance, uncertainty and hope: evolving people.

Things are not all comprehensible and expressible as one would mostly have us believe; most events are inexpressible, taking place in a realm which no word has ever entered, and more inexpressible than all else are works of art, mysterious existences, the life of which, while ours passes away, endures.