Quotes by Vissarion Belinsky

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Poetry and science are identical, if we consider them as things understood not only by one of the properties of our soul, but by the fullness of our spiritual being, which we express by the word "reason."

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Poetry and science are identical, if by science we must understand not only the schemes of knowledge and the understanding of the idea hidden in them...

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Poetry is life before it is art.

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Man has been and will always be the most curious phenomenon for man.

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Man expresses himself clearly when he is possessed by a thought, but he does so even more clearly when he himself possesses the thought.

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Man only fears what he does not know, knowledge conquering all fear.

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Man is neither animal nor angel; he must love neither like animals, nor platonically, but humanly.

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A belief must be dear to us only because it is true, and not because it is our own.

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It is good to be a scientist, poet, soldier, legislator, etc., but it is bad not to be human.

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A disciple will never surpass his master if he sees in him a model, and not a rival.

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The mind is the spiritual weapon of man.

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For every true talent, every person is a type, and every type is to the reader a familiar stranger.

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Work makes a man noble. The soul, like the body, has its own gymnastics, without which the soul withers and falls into the apathy of lack of action.

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Human knowledge does not consist only of mathematics and technology. On the contrary, they are only an aspect of knowledge, they are for now only lower knowledge; higher knowledge embraces the moral world and contains within its field of reference all that is great and holy to man.

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The greater the genius of the poet, the more deeply and vastly will he understand nature, and the more successfully will he present it to us in relation to life.

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Those young people who grow old past maturity are just as disgusting as those old people who want to look young.

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Youth is itself the poetry of life, for in youth everyone is better than in any other period of life.

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Selfishness is resourceful like a chameleon...

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The school of unhappiness is the best school.

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For a feeling itself to turn into poetry; the feeling must arise from the idea and express it. Irrational feelings are the lot of animals; they humiliate man.

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The sense of humanity is offended when one does not respect each other's human dignity, but it is even more offended and suffers when man does not respect his own dignity.

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Feeling is like fire and thought is like oil.

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Honest people always have the bad habit of looking down in shame at arrogance and cheeky meanness.

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The younger a child is, the more immediate must be the moral education he receives, the more we must not teach him, but train him with good feelings, with useful inclinations and manners, all based on - mostly out of habit.

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The stronger a poet's talent, the more original it is.

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The vocation of woman is to instill in man energy of soul, the ardor of noble passions, and to preserve in him a sense of duty and aspiration to the sublime and holy—this is the remarkable and sacred vocation of woman.

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Society finds in literature its real life, elevated to an ideal.

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One of the highest principles of true morality is respect for human dignity in every human being without distinction.

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The instrument and intermediary of education must be love, and the goal must be humanity.

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The father loves his child, because he is his creation; but he must also love him as a future man. Only such love towards children is true and worthy to be called love; anything else is selfishness, cold self-love.

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Anyone's patriotism is proven not by words but by deeds.

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In my firm opinion, a marriage union should not be public, as it concerns only the two of them and no one else.

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Villains succeed in their pursuits because they do to honest men as they do to villains, and honest men do to villains as they do to honest men.

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The concept of progress as the source and goal of historical movement...must be a direct and immediate conclusion springing from the vision of the people and mankind conceived as ideal embodiments.

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The moral education of children must be negative, that is, it must consist in the elimination of any bad examples and in the development in them of the sense of love, justice and humanity, not through moral rules, but through the force of example.

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No person in the world is born fully formed, that is, fully formed, but any vine is nothing but a permanent development, a continuous formation.

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We interrogate the past to explain the present and help us understand the future.

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To find the way, to know one's place: this is the essence of man, this is to become himself.

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Attacks ... on the shortcomings and vices of populism are not a crime, but a merit, a true patriotism.

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Even in jest you don't have to lie and flatter. Let anyone think of you whatever they want, and you be what you are.

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It is not good to be sick, and it is even worse to die, but the worst thing is to be sick and die thinking that nothing will be left behind you in the world.

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There is nothing more dangerous than tying your fate to the fate of a woman just because she is young and beautiful.

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There is nothing more sacred and selfless than a mother's love; every affection, every love, every passion is either weak, or has an interest, in comparison with it.

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It is no crime to love several times in life, and no merit to love only once: to reproach yourself for the first and to boast of the second is equally absurd.

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There is no man so bad that an effective education cannot make him good.

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Only ideas and not words have power over society.

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Poetry is the highest kind of art. Any other kind of art is more or less constrained and limited in its creative activity to the material through which it manifests itself. And poetry is expressed by free creative word, which is also sound and image and idea defined and clearly pronounced. Therefore, poetry includes all the elements of other art genres.

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Creativity is a great gift of nature; an act of creation in a creative soul is a great mystery; the moment of creation is a sacred moment.

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Passion is the poetry and flower of life, but what would be the point of passions if there is no will in the heart.

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Superstition disappears with the successes of civilization.

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Theoretical morality, which is discovered only in systems and words, but which does not speak of itself as a deed, which arises only as a result of the contemplation of the mind, but has no deep roots in the heart, - such a morality has the same value as and lack of morals.

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Only in the power of the will lies the condition of our success in the chosen field.

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Only holy mediocrity enjoys the enviable privilege of not irritating anyone and having no enemies and adversaries.

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Only happiness is the measure and test of love.

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He who does not stick to his views on humanity is unscrupulous.

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Laughter is often an important tool for distinguishing truth from lies.

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What do I care how the simple man lives, if a personality suffers? What do I care that a genius on earth lives as in heaven, when the crowd lies in the mire?

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It is impossible to create a language because it is created by the people; philologists only discover the laws and systematize them, and writers only create within it according to these laws.

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Let a child play tricks only if they are not harmful and do not leave a mark on his physical and morale.

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All men drink and eat, but only the savages get drunk and eat like pigs.

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Reason is given to man in order that he may live rationally, and not merely to make him see that he lives rashly.

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Reason and feeling are the two forces which need each other equally, and which, without each other, are dead and unimportant.

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Rational education makes bad nature less bad, even better, develops to a certain extent even the weakest qualities, and humanizes even the most limited and superficial nature.

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The heart has its laws, even if it is not easy to form a completely systematized code from them.

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A word reflects an idea: if an idea is not clear, it means that the word is not clear.

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Nature creates man, but society develops and forms him.

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A measure of a woman's dignity can be the man she loves.

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A lot of people live not living, but only preparing to live.

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You may not love your brother if he is a bad man, but you cannot not love your country, whatever it may be: only that this love should not be a dead state of contentment with what is given, but a desire for improvement.

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A man with a feminine character is one of the most poisonous slanders against man.

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The starting point of moral perfection is, first of all, a material necessity.

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Education is a great thing: it decides man's destiny.

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People die so that humanity can live.

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My friend is the one to whom I can tell everything.

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In the flow of time, only that which does not contain a strong grain of life dies, and therefore does not deserve to live.

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It is foolish to open a sea chart to cross a pond with a canoe.

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Humanism is the love of people developed through awareness and education.

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The essence is not in the word, but in the tone with which the word is spoken.

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For love you need rational content, just as you need oil for fire.

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There is nothing more pleasing to base natures than to avenge their own nothingness by throwing the mud of their convictions and opinions on all that is holy and great.

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Dramatic poets create actors.

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Where there is neither complete sincerity nor complete trust, where at least something remains hidden, there is not and cannot be talk of friendship.

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Friendship, like love, is a rose of a gorgeous color, with a delightful aroma, but with prickly thorns.

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If a choice in love were made only by will and mind, then love would not be a feeling, but a passion. The presence of an element of spontaneity is noticeable even in the most thoughtful love, because out of several equally worthy people, only one is chosen, and this choice is based on the involuntary attraction of the heart.

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If the purpose of our life consisted only in our personal happiness, and our personal happiness consisted only in love, then life would indeed be a dreary desert... But praise eternal reason, praise providence care! For man there is the great world of life, apart from the inner world of the heart—the world of historical contemplation and social activity—that great world where a thought becomes a deed, and a high feeling becomes a feat... And happy is he who he was not a silent spectator, watching this noisy ocean of life…

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If so far mankind has achieved a lot, it means that it has to achieve even more soon. Humanity has already begun to understand that it is humanity: soon it will really want to become humanity. There are many kinds of education and development, and each of them is important in itself, but above all these must be moral education.

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Abominable is he that praiseth himself; but disgusting is also the man without the consciousness of some power or quality of his own.

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The highest and most sacred interest of society is its own well-being, distributed equally to each of its members.

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All dignity, all power are calm precisely because they are confident in themselves.

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In the immediate life of mankind we see the aspiration to rational knowledge, the aspiration to make the immediate conscious at the same time, for the full triumph of rationality consists in the harmonious fusion of the immediate with the conscious.

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Inspiration is not the exclusive property of an artist: without it the scientist will not succeed much, without it even the craftsman will not do much, because inspiration is everywhere, in everything, in every activity.

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The greatest treasure is a good library.

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Believing and not knowing - this still means something to a man; but knowing and not believing - this means absolutely nothing.

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To see and respect a woman's personality is not only a necessary, but even an obligatory condition of the love of the decent man of our time.

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To see a beautifully published book withering is as unpleasant as to see a man empty inside but enjoying all the material goods of life.

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To educate is not only to nurse and nurse, but also to direct the heart and the mind - does not this require the mother to have character, skill and access to all human interests?

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Everything is good and wonderful in harmony, in accordance with itself. Unnaturally and prematurely developed children are moral monsters. Any precocious maturity is like a corruption of childhood.

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Every noble personality is deeply aware of his blood ties to the motherland.

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Any extreme is a sister to bordering.

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Any love is true and beautiful in its own way, only if it is in the heart, and not in the head.

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There are all kinds of people and there are all kinds of passions. Well, in one, all the passion, all the pathos of his nature lies in his cold anger, and he is intelligent, talented, and even healthy only when he bites.

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The desire for death brings out the most false and illusory state of mind.

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A wife is not a mistress, but a friend and a companion of our life, and we must accustom ourselves in time to the thought of loving her even when she is an old woman, but also when she is an old woman.

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People do not usually rejoice so much in what is given to them as they grieve over what is not given to them.

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Who will tell me the truth about myself, if not a friend.

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He who does not go forward, goes backward: there is no other option.

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He who does not belong to his country does not belong to humanity.

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He who has not first become a man is a bad citizen.

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He who suddenly expresses his opinions about the actions of others, thus forces himself to act better than others.

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Love kindness and you will be useful to your country without much effort.

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Love is offered only to love.

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Love and respect for parents are undoubtedly holy feelings.

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Love has its own laws of development, its stages, just like human life. It has a splendid spring, a hot summer, and finally an autumn which for some is warm, bright, and fruitful, and for others cold, rotten, and barren.

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Love for the country must start from love for humanity, as part of the whole. To love one's country means to desire passionately to see in it the realization of the ideal of humanity and to contribute to it according to the measure of one's powers.

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Love is so strong that it does the impossible, it always triumphs over the ever-changing conditions of space and time, over the weakness of the body, giving the baby the strength of a lion.

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Love often errs, seeing in the object of passion something that is not there, but love alone discovers the beautiful and the sublime where the spirit of observation and reason see nothing.

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Love, as one of the strongest passions that drives man from one extreme to another more than any other passion, can serve as the touchstone of morality.

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He who has nothing to say, better to be silent.

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The book is the life of our time, everyone needs it, both the old and the young.

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To love is to feel and to think, to suffer and to be happy, any other kind of life is the same as death.

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Of all the bad habits that show the lack of solid education and the excesses of ignorance, the worst is not calling a spade a spade.

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Of all the great critics, the most brilliant and infallible is time.

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Of all kinds of fame, the most flattering, grandest, and most incorruptible is popular fame.

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Of all human passions, after self-love, the most powerful and ferocious is the love of power.

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Man's individuality naturally does not tolerate alienation and loneliness and seeks sympathy and trust from its fellows.

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Art without a thought, like a man without a soul, is a corpse.

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Truth is above men and need not fear them.

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Slander is not always a bad deed: more often than not, it is the result of an innocent desire to entertain yourself in an interesting conversation, and at other times, the result of kindness and compassion so sincere that it becomes uncomfortable.

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However rich and luxurious the inner life of man may be, however hot it may be, it is not complete unless it includes within itself the interests of the outer world, of society and of mankind.

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A true and strong talent cannot be killed by the harshness of criticism, any more than an insignificant talent can be taught by its praise.

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Truly human love can only be based on mutual respect for human dignity, and not just on a caprice of feelings or a whim of the heart.

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True morality grows from the heart, aided by the bright rays of reason. Its measure is not given by words but by practical activities.

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Without deep moral feeling, man can have neither love nor honesty - none of what makes a real man.

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Without health, happiness is impossible.

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Without the aspiration to infinity there is no life, no development, no progress.

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Without passions and contradictions there is neither life nor poetry. If in these passions and contradictions there is wisdom and humanity, then their effects also lead man to his goal.

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There is no activity without a purpose, no purpose without interests, no life without activity.

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The source of interests, purposes and activity is the substance of social life.

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Good is he who, being dissatisfied with the present reality, keeps in his soul an ideal of a better existence, who lives and breathes with only one thought - that of contributing, according to the means given to him by nature, to the realization of this ideal on earth...

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Apathy and laziness are a veritable freezing of body and soul.

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Marriage is the reality of love. Only a fully mature soul can truly love, and in this case love sees in marriage its highest reward, and in the brightness of the crown it does not weaken, but unfolds its fragrant flower even wider, as in the rays of the sun...

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In the important affairs of life you must always hurry as if everything would perish because of a lost minute.

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In art, everything that is untrue in reality appears as a lie and demonstrates not talent but lack of grace.

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Struggle is a condition of life: life ceases when the struggle ends.