Between labor and play stands work. A man is a worker if he is personally interested in the job which society pays him to do; what... from the point of view of society is necessary labor is from his point of view voluntary play. Whether a job is to be classified as labor or work depends, not on the job itself, but on the tastes of the individual who undertakes it. The difference does not, for example, coincide with the difference between a manual and a mental job; a gardener or a cobbler may be a worker, a bank clerk a laborer.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Louise, something in me tightens when an American intellectual's eyes shine, and they start to talk to me about the Russian people.... Something in me says, Watch it, a new version of Irish Catholicism is being offered for your faith.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Russian forests crash down under the axe, billions of trees are dying, the habitations of animals and birds are layed waste, river...s grow shallow and dry up, marvelous landscapes are disappearing forever.... Man is endowed with creativity in order to multiply that which has been given him; he has not created, but destroyed. There are fewer and fewer forests, rivers are drying up, wildlife has become extinct, the climate is ruined, and the earth is becoming ever poorer and uglier.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
An enormously vast field lies between "God exists" and "there is no God." The truly wise man traverses it with great difficulty. A... Russian knows one or the other of these two extremes, but is not interested in the middle ground. He usually knows nothing, or very little.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
In Western Europe people perish from the congestion and stifling closeness, but with us it is from the spaciousness.... The expans...es are so great that the little man hasn't the resources to orient himself.... This is what I think about Russian suicides.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Everyone judges plays as if they were very easy to write. They don't know that it is hard to write a good play, and twice as hard ...and tortuous to write a bad one.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
[Ognev] recalled endless, heated, purely Russian arguments, when the wranglers, spraying spittle and banging their fists on the ta...ble, fail to understand yet interrupt one another, themselves not even noticing it, contradict themselves with every phrase, change the subject, then, having argued for two or three hours, begin to laugh.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Watching a woman make Russian pancakes, you might think that she was calling on the spirits or extracting from the batter the phil...osopher's stone.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »