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Quote by Dan Levin

“To a friend, in an unguarded moment, he [Maxim Gorky, 1932] declared his ambition: simply to portray the world and man as they were, without the myth of love, ‘repudiating noting, praising nothing’; repudiation was unjust, while praise was premature—‘for we live in chaos and ourselves are fragments of chaos.’ He compared his desire with Einstein, ‘trying to alter radically our representation of the universe.”

Quote by Dan Levin

Book:Stormy Petrel: The Life and Work of Maxim Gorky
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Stormy Petrel: The Life and Work of Maxim Gorky

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Dan Levin

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“The ones to fear are those who cannot realize it: the ones who just see the structure and bind themselves to it because they are otherwise afraid. They look at the structure, and they just see no other way. They cannot seek anything beyond it or do not want to. Yet, they will also vehemently deny that they are unable to venture beyond the structure and castigate others they perceive to have that inability so as to make themselves feel superior. They will even delude themselves into assuming that they are free of structural influence and will violently oppose any who say otherwise. They will say that the structures are a pragmatic necessity for social cohesion, but that they, even as willing participants in it, remain capable of acknowledging external terms and associations. They just choose not to—that’s the line they go with. They choose the structure for a lack of any better alternative and will not go without one. Perhaps they are naïve, in that sense, and it is easy for them to believe that those who seek to negate their structures are either unscrupulous, foolish, or ego-driven.”

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“Some people in my position would now have felt rather crestfallen, and would have begun to think that they had made a very foolish mistake. Not the faintest misgiving of any kind troubled me. I did not feel in the slightest degree depreciated in my own estimation. And even now, after a lapse of three hours, my mind remains, I am happy to say, in the same calm and hopeful condition.”

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“Ah, among the unhappiest blunders a man makes is this, that he childishly misjudges the value of the gifts that nature bestows on him most easily, and, contrariwise, considers most precious the endowments that come hardest. The precious stone buried in the earth's entrails, the pearl hidden in the ocean depths—these are what people regard as the greatest treasures; but they would look down on them if nature strewed them underfoot like pebbles and seashells. We are casual about our own excellences; we try to deceive ourselves about out weaknesses so long that we end up taking them for eminent virtues. Once, after a concert by Paganini, when I confronted the master with passionate praises for his violin playing, he interrupted me with these words: 'But today how did you like my bows, my genuflections?”

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“Most of our failures in love involve self-deception. The other was not all that excited about the relationship, but we projected our enthusiasm onto the other and charged ahead. Or the other was hopeful, but we were cynical and attributed that same motivation to the other. We can ignore the needs of an other because they are not impulses we feel; we can ignore warning signs because they do not fit into our vision of what should be.”

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“Self-deception is the worst kind of deception and is a dangerous message to send to our kids. They will learn to do the same.”

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