Quote

To play safe, I prefer to accept only one type of power: the power of art over trash, the triumph of magic over the brute.

Vladimir Nabokov

Change background

T
T
T

Change font

TAGS & TOPICS

Vladimir Nabokov
Age: 77 †
Born: 1899
Born: January 1
Died: 1977
Died: January 1
Autobiographer
Chess Composer
Chess Player
Journalist
Lepidopterist
Literary Critic
Novelist
Playwright
Poet
Science Fiction Writer
St. Petersburg
Vladimir Vladimirovich Nabokov
Vladimir Sirin
Vl. Sirin
Wladimir Nabokoff-Sirin
V. Sirin
Play
Safety
Accept
Safe
Magic
Brute
Type
Brutes
Accepting
Trash
Art
Triumph
Power
Prefer

More quotes by Vladimir Nabokov

Image
I have no desires, save the desire to express myself in defiance of all the world’s muteness.
Vladimir Nabokov
Image
Dark pictures, thrones, the stones that pilgrims kiss Poems that take a thousand years to die But ape the immortality of this Red label on a little butterfly .
Vladimir Nabokov
Image
Because you took advantage of my disadvantage.
Vladimir Nabokov
Image
while the scientist sees everything that happens in one point of space, the poet feels everything that happens in one point of time.
Vladimir Nabokov
Image
The compensation for a death sentence is the knowledge of the exact hour when one is to die. A great luxury, but one that is well earned.
Vladimir Nabokov
Image
Old birds like Orlovius are wonderfully easy to lead by the beak, because a combination of decency and sentimentality is exactly equal to being a fool.
Vladimir Nabokov
Image
No difference exists between American and European manners. A proletarian from Chicago can be just as Philistine as an English duke.
Vladimir Nabokov
Image
Nymphets do not occur in polar regions.
Vladimir Nabokov
Image
One is always at home in one's past.
Vladimir Nabokov
Image
Dostoevky's lack of taste, his monotonous dealings with persons suffering with pre-Freudian complexes, the way he has of wallowing in the tragic misadventures of human dignity - all this is difficult to admire.
Vladimir Nabokov
Image
Occasionally, in the middle of a conversation her name would be mentioned, and she would run down the steps of a chance sentence, without turning her head.
Vladimir Nabokov
Image
In and out of my heart flowed my rainbow blood.
Vladimir Nabokov
Image
Don't touch me I'll die if you touch me.
Vladimir Nabokov
Image
My loathings are simple. stupidity, oppression, crime, cruelty, soft music. My pleasures are the most intense known to man: writing and butterfly hunting.
Vladimir Nabokov
Image
There is nothing in the world that I loathe more than group activity, that communal bath where the hairy and slippery mix in a multiplication of mediocrity.
Vladimir Nabokov
Image
Poetry involves the mysteries of the irrational perceived through rational words.
Vladimir Nabokov
Image
Why do those people guess so much and shave so little, and are so disdainful of hearing aids?
Vladimir Nabokov
Image
I have the European urge to use my feet when a drive can be dispensed with.
Vladimir Nabokov
Image
Chess problems demand from the composer the same virtues that characterize all worthwhile art: originality, invention, conciseness, harmony, complexity, and splendid insincerity
Vladimir Nabokov
Image
Devices which in some curious new way imitate nature are attractive to simple minds.
Vladimir Nabokov