Top 60 Leonid Andreyev Quotes (2025 Update)

1. “There is no beast more cruel than man.”

— Leonid Andreyev

2. “Only the dead know the truth.”

— Leonid Andreyev

3. “Wisdom and folly are equal before the face of Infinity, for Infinity knows them not.”

— Leonid Andreyev

4. “Life seemed to him to be a narrow cage, and her iron bars were many and dense, and there was only one way out.”

— Leonid Andreyev

5. “Bread without love is like grass without salt – the stomach may be filled, but it leaves a bad taste in the mouth.”

— Leonid Andreyev

6. “What worse can happen to a man than to have been born? It’s like asking a man who is drowning whether he is not afraid of getting wet.”

— Leonid Andreyev

7. “To succeed in life one needs two things – influence and a lucky star.”

— Leonid Andreyev

8. “Who strikes man with love – God or the Devil?”

— Leonid Andreyev

9. “Who is all-powerful in the world? Who is most dreadful in the world? The machine. Who is most fair, most wealthy, and all-wise? The machine. What is the earth? A machine. What is the sky? A machine. What is man? A machine. A machine.”

— Leonid Andreyev

10. “Men are always murderers, and their calmness and generosity is the calmness of a well-fed animal, that knows itself out of danger.”

— Leonid Andreyev

11. “All perishes, all decays, all is born again.”

— Leonid Andreyev

12. “When a man has the rope about his neck, you don’t ask him about his health!”

— Leonid Andreyev

13. “The papers are full of murders – strange murders. It is all nonsense that there are as many brains as there are men; mankind has only one intellect, and it is beginning to get muddled.”

— Leonid Andreyev

14. “I play because my loneliness is very great, very deep- I fear it has no bottom at all! I stand on the edge of an abyss and hurl words, many heavy words, into it, but they fall without a sound. I hurl into it laughter, threats and moans. I spit into it. I fling into it heaps of stones and rocks. I throw mountains into it- ant still it remains silent and empty.”

— Leonid Andreyev

15. “My loneliness is very great. I am not in need of friends, but I must speak of Myself and I have no one to speak to.”

— Leonid Andreyev

16. “No more did the frozen heart ache.”

— Leonid Andreyev

17. “But in the dark everything was unnatural; the silence and the darkness were in themselves something like death.”

— Leonid Andreyev

18. “I do not like Christians. They shake the tree of life, forbidding it to bear fruit, and they scatter to the wind it’s fragrant blossoms.”

— Leonid Andreyev

19. “Yes, I do read books but only for one purpose: to learn how to hate man and to hold him in contempt.”

— Leonid Andreyev

20. “The only thing not worth destroying is science. That would be useless. Science is unchangeable, and if you destroyed it today, it would rise up again the same as before.”

— Leonid Andreyev

21. “Don’t laugh at the voice of the stars. They are far away, their rays are light and pale, and we can barely see their sleeping shadows, but their sorcery is stern and dark.”

— Leonid Andreyev

22. “Ah well, ’tis the way of the world – births and deaths, births and deaths.”

— Leonid Andreyev

23. “Man dies. Come from darkness, into darkness he returns, and is reabsorbed, without a trace left, into the illimitable void of time.”

— Leonid Andreyev

24. “The loss of reason in war seems to me honorable, like the death of a sentry at his post.”

— Leonid Andreyev

25. “Only the footsteps of the blind are short, but their thoughts are long.”

— Leonid Andreyev

26. “When a woman weeps, it is a man’s shame.”

— Leonid Andreyev

27. “I cannot get accustomed to war; my brain refuses to understand and explain a thing that is senseless in its basis. Millions of people gather at one place and, giving their actions order and regularity, kill each other, and it hurts everybody equally, and all are unhappy – what is it if not madness?”

— Leonid Andreyev

28. “The moon was so young, so strange, even as a young girl who is dreaming and is afraid to tell her dreams; and it was shining only for itself.”

— Leonid Andreyev

29. “Rome fell silently to ruins. A New city rose in its place, and it was too erased by emptiness. Like phantom Giants, cities, kingdoms, and countries swiftly fell and disappeared into emptiness – swallowed up in the black maw of the Infinite.”

— Leonid Andreyev

30. “He did not dissociate his thought from himself; he thought integrally, with the whole of his body; and each logical deduction forthwith became real to him – as happens only with very healthy or direct persons who have not yet turned thought into a pastime.”

— Leonid Andreyev

31. “Thus will we deal with life, my little help-meet. Will we not, eh? What though it blink at us like an owl that is blinded by the sun, we will yet force it to smile.”

— Leonid Andreyev

32. “You love humanity and I detest it. At best I am indifferent to it. Let it live and not interfere with me.”

— Leonid Andreyev

33. “Do you not see the hand of God, which gives harmony, light, and love to the world? Do not the mountains, in the blue cloud of incense, sing their hymn of glory?”

— Leonid Andreyev

34. “Perhaps her mind simply did not want to stop at one thought – just as a bird that soars with ease, which sees endless horizons, and to which all space, all the depth, all the joy of the soft and caressing azure are accessible.”

— Leonid Andreyev

35. “But, as is sometimes the case with good people, he was perhaps liked more for this little foible than for his good qualities.”

— Leonid Andreyev

36. “Death stationed itself in the corner and would not go away. It would not go away because it was my thought. It is not death that is terrible, but the knowledge of it: it would be utterly impossible to live if a man could know exactly and definitely the day and hour of his death.”

— Leonid Andreyev

37. “I do not want to lie so rudely and ungracefully. I will lie to you elsewhere, when you least expect it, and that will be far more interesting for both of us.”

— Leonid Andreyev

38. “Death augments distance and dulls the memory. Death reconciles.”

— Leonid Andreyev

39. “It’s a powerful instrument, dynamite – nothing like it for a convincing argument!”

— Leonid Andreyev

40. “The truth of life stands aghast in silence, and its brazen falsehood is loudly shouting, uttering pressing, painful questions: “With whom shall I sympathize? Whom shall I trust? Whom shall I love?”

— Leonid Andreyev

41. “Literature, which I have the honor to serve, is dear to me just because the noblest task it sets before itself is that of wiping out boundaries and distances.”

— Leonid Andreyev

42. “She was thinking of many things, for to her the thread of life was not broken by Death, but kept winding along calmly and evenly.”

— Leonid Andreyev

43. “What do those people think? That there is nothing more terrible than death. They themselves have invented Death, they are themselves afraid of it, and they try to frighten us with it.”

— Leonid Andreyev

44. “Death was not there as yet, but life was there no longer, – there was something new, something astonishing, inexplicable, not entirely reasonable and yet not altogether without meaning, – something so deep and mysterious and supernatural that it was impossible to understand.”

— Leonid Andreyev

45. “Ik voel me zo vrij alsof ik niet ben opgesloten, maar zojuist ben bevrijd uit de gevangenis van mij leven.”

— Leonid Andreyev

46. “To-morrow, with the rise of the sun, this human face would be distorted with an inhuman grimace, her brain would be covered with thick blood, and her eyes would bulge from their sockets and look glassy, – but now she slept quietly and smiled in her great immortality.”

— Leonid Andreyev

47. “The fear of death came over him gradually. It was as if somebody were striking his heart a powerful blow with the fist from below.”

— Leonid Andreyev

48. “The banks of life cannot hold my love, which is as broad as the sea.”

— Leonid Andreyev

49. “But for a long time, altogether unnoticed by his comrades, there had ripened in his soul a dark contempt for mankind; contempt mingled with despair and painful, almost deadly fatigue.”

— Leonid Andreyev

50. “It seemed to him that he was walking along the highest mountain-ridge, which was narrow like the blade of a knife, and on one side he saw Life, on the other side – Death, – like two sparkling, deep, beautiful seas, blending in one boundless, broad surface at the horizon.”

— Leonid Andreyev