Quotes from book
My Past and Thoughts

Name: My Past and Thoughts
Author: Alexander Herzen

Alexander HerzenOriginal title Былое и думы (Russian, 1868)

My Past and Thoughts is an extensive autobiography by Alexander Herzen, which he started in the early 1850s and continued to expand and revise throughout his later life. Serialized in Polyarnaya Zvezda, the book in its full form came out as a separate edition after its author's death. In Herzen's lifetime the major parts of the book were translated into English , German and French . Providing the panoramic view on the social and political life in Russian Empire as well as the European West of the mid-19th century, this seminal, even if in many ways controversial, work is considered to be the classic of Russian memoirist literature.

“There is no art more akin to mysticism than architecture. Abstract, geometrical, musical and yet dumb, passionless, it depends entirely upon symbolism, form and suggestion. Simple lies, and the harmonious combination and numerical relations between these, present something mysterious and at the same time incomplete.”

Alexander Herzen book My Past and Thoughts

My Past and Thoughts(1852-1870)

“Socialism and rationalism are to this day the touchstones of humanity, the rocks which lie in the course of revolution and science. Groups of swimmers, driven by reflection or the waves of circumstance against these rocks, break up at once into two camps, which, under different disguises, remain the same throughout all history, and may be distinguished either in a great political party or in a group of a dozen young men. One represents logic; the other, history: one stands for dialectics; the other for evolution. Truth is the main object of the former, and feasibility of the latter.”

Alexander Herzen book My Past and Thoughts

ibid, Ch. 8, s. 12
My Past and Thoughts(1852-1870)

“A religion of life had come to replace a religion of penance and emaciation, of fasting and prayer. The crucified body had risen in its turn and was no longer abashed Man had reached a harmonious unity: he had discovered that he is a single being not made, like a pendulum, of two different metals,= that check each other; he realised that the foe in his members had ceased to exist.”

Alexander Herzen book My Past and Thoughts

ibid, Ch. 8, s. 12
My Past and Thoughts(1852-1870)

“I have a sincere pity for any nation where old heads grow on young shoulders; youth is a matter, not only of years, but of temperament.”

Alexander Herzen book My Past and Thoughts

ibid, Ch. 7, s.3
My Past and Thoughts(1852-1870)