It seems to me that all of the evil in life comes from idleness, boredom, and psychic emptiness, but all of that is inevitable when you become accustomed to living at others' expense.
When you want to touch the reader's heart, try to be colder. It gives their grief as it were, a background, against which it stands out in greater relief.
Common hypocrites pass themselves off as doves; political and literary hypocrites pose as eagles. But don't be fooled by their eagle-like appearance. These are not eagles, but rats or dogs.
Love is a great thing. It is not by chance that in all times and practically among all cultured peoples love in the general senseand the love of a man for his wife are both called love. If love is often cruel or destructive, the reasons lie not in love itself, but in the inequality between people.
He always seemed to women different from what he was, and they loved in him not himself, but the man created by their imagination, whom they had been eagerly seeking all their lives; and afterwards, when they noticed their mistake, they loved him all the same.
I agree that one can't dispense with the reins and the whip altogether, for knaves find their way even into literature, but no thinking will discover a better police for literature than the critics and the author's own conscience.
God's world is a good place. The one thing not good in it is we. How little justice and humility there is in us. How little we understand true patriotism!