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Vladimir Nabokov

12 quotes

Who is Vladimir Nabokov? The quotes below are the best introduction we can offer. The range of their thinking — from Imagination to Art — speaks to an intellectual restlessness that shows in every quote. Our collection holds 17 quotes from Vladimir Nabokov, each offering a different angle on Imagination, Art, Work, War, and Time. Here is a taste of their wisdom: "A work of art has no importance whatever to society. It is only important to the individual."

“Poetry involves the mysteries of the irrational perceived through rational words.”

— Vladimir Nabokov

Poetry

All Quotes by Vladimir Nabokov

“Discussion in class, which means letting twenty young blockheads and two cocky neurotics discuss something that neither their teacher nor they know.”

— Vladimir Nabokov

Teacher

“It is hard, I submit, to loathe bloodshed, including war, more than I do, but it is still harder to exceed my loathing of the very nature of totalitarian states in which massacre is only an administrative detail.”

— Vladimir Nabokov

Nature

“A writer should have the precision of a poet and the imagination of a scientist.”

— Vladimir Nabokov

Imagination

“Poetry involves the mysteries of the irrational perceived through rational words.”

— Vladimir Nabokov

Poetry

“A novelist is, like all mortals, more fully at home on the surface of the present than in the ooze of the past.”

— Vladimir Nabokov

Home

“Imagination, the supreme delight of the immortal and the immature, should be limited. In order to enjoy life, we should not enjoy it too much.”

— Vladimir Nabokov

Imagination

“Life is a great sunrise. I do not see why death should not be an even greater one.”

— Vladimir Nabokov

Death

“A work of art has no importance whatever to society. It is only important to the individual.”

— Vladimir Nabokov

Art

“My loathings are simple: stupidity, oppression, crime, cruelty, soft music.”

— Vladimir Nabokov

Music

“I confess, I do not believe in time.”

— Vladimir Nabokov

Time

“Genius is an African who dreams up snow.”

— Vladimir Nabokov

Dreams

“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

Art