All Things are Possible Quotes

“The business of philosophy is to teach man to live in uncertainty... not to reassure him, but to upset him.”
― Lev Shestov, All Things are Possible

“Moral people are the most revengeful of mankind, they employ their morality as the best and most subtle weapon of vengeance. They are not satisfied with simply despising and condemning their neighbour themselves, they want the condemnation to be universal and supreme: that is, that all men should rise as one against the condemned, and that even the offender's own conscience shall be against him. Then only are they fully satisfied and reassured. Nothing on earth but morality could lead to such wonderful results.”
― Lev Shestov, All Things are Possible

“After a tragedy, a farce. Philosophy enters into her power, and the earth returns under one's feet.”
― Lev Shestov, All Things are Possible

“Once an idea is there, the gates must be opened to it.”
― Lev Shestov, All Things Are Possible

“If he tells the truth, it is because the most reeking lie no longer intoxicates him, even though he swallow it not in the modest doses that idealism offers, but in immoderate quantities, thousand-gallon-barrel gulps. He would taste the bitterness, but it would not make his head turn, as it does Schiller's, or Dostoevsky's, or even Socrates’, whose head, as we know, could stand any quantity of wine, but went spinning with the most commonplace lie.”
― Lev Shestov, All Things are Possible

“And many a time, towards the end of life, does the genius repent of his choice. "It would be better not to startle the world, but to live at one with it," says Ibsen in his last drama. Genius is a wretched, blind maniac, whose eccentricities are condoned because of what is got from him.”
― Lev Shestov, All Things are Possible

“Whilst stay-at-home persons are searching for truth, the apple will stay on the tree.”
― Lev Shestov, All Things are Possible

“So long as the child was fed on its mother's milk, everything seemed to it smooth and easy. But when it had to give up milk and take to vodka, - and this is the inevitable law of human development - the childish suckling dreams receded into the realm of the irretrievable past.”
― Lev Shestov, All Things are Possible

“When man finds in himself a certain defect, of which he can by no means rid himself, there remains but to accept the so-called failing as a natural quality. The more grave and important the defect, the more urgent is the need to ennoble it.”
― Lev Shestov, All Things Are Possible

“Objectionable, tedious, irritating labour, - this is the condition of genius, which no doubt explains the reason why men so rarely achieve anything. Genius must submit to cultivate an ass within itself - the condition being so humiliating that man will seldom take up the job.”
― Lev Shestov, All Things are Possible

“We very often express in a categorical form a judgment of which we do not feel assured, we even lay stress on its absolute validity. We want to see what opposition it will arouse, and this can be achieved only by stating our assumption not as a tentative suggestion, which no one will consider, but as an irrefutable, all-important truth. The greater the value of the assumption has for us, the more carefully do we conceal any suggestion of its improbability.”
― Lev Shestov, All Things are Possible

“Many a present-day Alcibiades, who laves all the week in the muddy waters of life, comes on Sundays to cleanse himself in the pure stream of Tolstovian ideas. Book-keeping is satisfied with this modest success, and assumes that if it commands universal attention one day in the week, then obviously it is the sum and essence of life, beyond which man needs nothing. On the same grounds the keepers of public baths could argue that, since so many people come to them on Saturdays, therefore cleanliness is the highest ambition of man, and during the week no one should stir at all, lest he sweat or soil himself.”
― Lev Shestov, All Things are Possible

“But nobody has ever yet called a philosopher "a hired conscience," though everybody gives the lawyer this nickname. Why this partiality?”
― Lev Shestov, All Things are Possible

“Although we had had no precise exponents of realism, yet after Pushkin it was impossible for a Russian writer to depart too far from actuality. Even those who did not know what to do with "real life" had to cope with it as best they could. Hence, in order that the picture of life should not prove too depressing, the writer must provide himself in due season with a philosophy.”
― Lev Shestov, All Things are Possible

“Pushkin could cry hot tears, and he who can weep can hope. "I want to live, so that I may think and suffer," he says; and it seems as if the word "to suffer," which is so beautiful in the poem, just fell in accidentally, because there was no better rhyme in Russian for "to die.”
― Lev Shestov, All Things are Possible

“Римские авгуры имели более тонкий и гибкий ум, чем современные литераторы: чтоб обманывать других, им не нужно было обманывать себя.”
― Лев Шестов, All Things are Possible

“If you turn to the right, you will marry, if to the left, you will be killed." A true philosopher never chooses the middle course; he needs no riches, he does not know what to do with money. But whether he turns to the right or to the left, nothing pleasant awaits him.”
― Lev Shestov, All Things are Possible

“So long as Apollo calls him not to the sacred offering, of all the trifling children of men the most trifling perhaps is the poet." Put Poushkin's expression into plain language, and you will get a page on neuropathology. All neurasthenic individuals sink from a state of extreme excitation to one of complete prostration. Poets too: and they are proud of it.”
― Lev Shestov, All Things are Possible

“While he was yet young, when he wrote his story, Enough, Turgenev saw that something terrible hung over his life. He saw, but did not get frightened, although he understood that in time he ought to become frightened, because life without a continual inner disturbance would have no meaning for him.”
― Lev Shestov, All Things are Possible

“A philosopher should not be afraid of scepticism, but should go on bruising his jaw. Perhaps the failure of metaphysics lies in the caution and timidity of metaphysicians, who seem ostensibly so brave. They have sought for rest—which they describe as the highest boon. Whereas they should have valued more than anything restlessness, aimlessness, even purposelessness. How can you tell when the partition will be removed? Perhaps at the very moment when man ceased his painful pursuit, settled all his questions and rested on his laurels, inert, he could with one strong push have swept through the pernicious fence which separated him from the unknowable. There is no need for man to move according to a carefully-considered plan. This is a purely aesthetic demand which need not bind us. Let man senselessly and deliriously knock his head against the wall—if the wall go down at last, will he value his triumph any the less?”
― Lev Shestov, All Things are Possible

“A poet is, on the one hand, among the elect; on the other hand, he is one of the most insignificant of mortals. Hence we can draw a very consoling conclusion: the most insignificant of men are not altogether so worthless as we imagine. They may not be fit to occupy government positions or professorial chairs, but they are often extremely at home on Parnassus and such high places. Apollo rewards vice, and virtue, as everybody knows, is so satisfied with herself she needs no reward. Then why do the pessimists lament? Leibnitz was quite right: we live in the best possible of worlds. I would even suggest that we leave out the modification "possible.”
― Lev Shestov, All Things are Possible

“An arm-chair philosopher, enclosed by four walls, sees nothing but those four walls, and yet of these precisely he does not choose to speak. If by accident he suddenly realised them and spoke of them his philosophy might acquire an enormous value. This may happen when a study is converted into a prison: the same four walls, but impossible not to think of them! Whatever the prisoner turns his mind to—Homer, the Greek-Persian wars, the future world-peace, the bygone geological cataclysms—still the four walls enclose it all. The calm of the study supplanted by the pathos of imprisonment. The prisoner has no more contact with the world, and no less. But now he no longer slumbers and has grayish dreams called world-conceptions. He is wide awake and strenuously living. His philosophy is worth hearing. But man is not distinguished for his powers of discrimination. He sees solitude and four walls, and says: a study. He dreams of the market-place, where there is noise and jostling, physical bustle, and decides that there alone life is to be met. He is wrong as usual. In the market-place, among the crowd, do not men sleep their deadest sleep? And is not the keenest spiritual activity taking place in seclusion?”
― Lev Shestov, All Things are Possible

“People go to philosophers for general principles. And since philosophers are human, they are kept busy supplying the market with general principles. But what sense is there in them? None at all. Nature demands individual creative activity from us. Men won't understand this, so they wait forever for the ultimate truths from philosophy, which they will never get. Why should not every grown-up person be a creator, live in his own way at his own risk and have his own experience? Children and raw youths must go in leading strings. But adult people who want to feel the reins should be despised. They are cowards, and slothful: afraid to try, they eternally go to the wise for advice. And the wise do not hesitate to take the responsibility for the lives of others. They invent general rules, as if they had access to the sources of knowledge. What foolery! The wise are no wiser than the stupid—they have only more conceit and effrontery. Every intelligent man laughs in his soul at "bookish" views. And are not books the work of the wise? They are often extremely interesting—but only in so far as they do not contain general rules. Woe to him, who would build up his life according to Hegel, Schopenhauer, Tolstoy, Schiller, or Dostoevsky. He must read them, but he must have sense, a mind of his own to live with. Those who have tried to live according to theories from books have found this out. At the best, their efforts produced banality. There is no alternative. Whether man likes or not he will at last have to realise that cliches are worthless, and that he must live from himself. There are no all-binding, universal judgments—let us manage with non-binding, non-universal ones. Only professors will suffer for it....”
― Lev Shestov, All Things are Possible

“People who read much must always keep it in mind that life is one thing, literature another. Not that authors invariably lie. I declare that there are writers who rarely and most reluctantly lie. But one must know how to read, and that isn't easy. Out of a hundred book-readers ninety-nine have no idea what they are reading about. It is a common belief, for example, that any writer who sings of suffering must be ready at all times to open his arms to the weary and heavy-laden. This is what his readers feel when they read his books. Then when they approach him with their woes, and find that he runs away without looking back at them, they are filled with indignation and talk of the discrepancy between word and deed. Whereas the fact is, the singer has more than enough woes of his own, and he sings them because he can't get rid of them. L'uccello canto, nella gabbia, non di gioia ma di rabbia, says the Italian proverb: "The bird sings in the cage, not from joy but from rage." It is impossible to love sufferers, particularly hopeless sufferers, and whoever says otherwise is a deliberate liar.”
― Lev Shestov, All Things are Possible

“A writer works himself up to a pitch of ecstasy, otherwise he does not take up his pen. But ecstasy is not so easily distinguished from other kinds of excitement. And as a writer is always in haste to write, he has rarely the patience to wait, but at the first promptings of animation begins to pour himself forth. So in the name of ecstasy we are offered such quantities of banal, by no means ecstatic effusions. Particularly easy it is to confound with ecstasy that very common sort of spring-time liveliness which in our language is well-named calf-rapture. And calf-rapture is much more acceptable to the public than true inspiration or genuine transport. It is easier, more familiar.”
― Lev Shestov, All Things are Possible

“In an old French writer, a contemporary of Pascal, I came across the following remarkable words: "L'homme est si miserable que l'inconstance avec laquelle il abandonne ses desseins est, en quelque sorte, sa plus grande vertu; parce qu'il temoigne par là qu'il y a encore en lui quelque reste de grandeur qui le porte à se dégouter de choses qui ne méritent pas son amour et son estime." What a long way modern thought has travelled from even the possibility of such an assumption. To consider inconstancy the finest human virtue! Surely in order to get somewhere in life it is necessary to give the whole self, one's whole energy to the service of some one particular purpose. In order to be a virtuoso, a master of one's art and one's instrument, it is necessary with a truly angelic or asinine patience to try over and over again, dozens, hundreds, thousands of times, different ways of expressing one's ideas or moods, sparing neither labour, nor time, nor health. Everything else must take a second place. The first must be occupied by "the Art." Goncharov, in his novel Obryv, cleverly relates how a 'cellist struggled all day, like a fish against the ice, sawing and sawing away, so that later on, in the evening, he might play super-excellently well. And that is the general idea. Objectionable, tedious, irritating labour,—this is the condition of genius, which no doubt explains the reason why men so rarely achieve anything. Genius must submit to cultivate an ass within itself—the condition being so humiliating that man will seldom take up the job. The majority prefer talent, that medium which lies between genius and mediocrity. And many a time, towards the end of life, does the genius repent of his choice. "It would be better not to startle the world, but to live at one with it," says Ibsen in his last drama. Genius is a wretched, blind maniac, whose eccentricities are condoned because of what is got from him. And still we all bow to persevering talent, to the only god in whom we moderns believe, and the eulogy of inconstancy will awake very little sympathy in our hearts. Probably we shall not even regard it seriously.”
― Lev Shestov, All Things are Possible

“When man finds in himself a certain defect, of which he can by no means rid himself, there remains but to accept the so-called failing as a natural quality. The more grave and important the defect, the more urgent is the need to ennoble it. From sublime to ridiculous is only one step, and an ineradicable vice in strong men is always rechristened a virtue.”
― Lev Shestov, All Things are Possible

“We think with peculiar intensity during the hard moments of our life—we write when we have nothing else to do. So that a writer can only communicate something of importance in reproducing the past. When we are driven to think, we have unfortunately no mind to write, which accounts for the fact that books are never more than a feeble echo of what a man has gone through.”
― Lev Shestov, All Things are Possible

“И на смену старого credo, quia absurdum явилось новое, вернее, обновлённое и неузнанное credo, ut intelligam”
― Lev Shestov, All Things are Possible

“Наши современники не хотят искать и потому так много разговаривают о теории познания.”
― Лев Шестов, All Things are Possible