"Lebedev: ...There'll be a scandal, the tongues of the whole district will buzz with gossip, but it's better to go through a scandal, isn't it, than to destroy yourself for your whole life."

"A hungry dog believes in nothing but meat."

"Knowledge is of no value unless you put it into practice."

"The teacher must be an actor, an artist,passionately in love with his work."

"Three o'clock in the morning. The soft April night is looking at my windows and caressingly winking at me with its stars. I can't sleep, I am so happy."

"Anna Petrovna: Kolya, my dearest, stay at home.Ivanov: My love, my unhappy darling, I beg you, don't stop me going out in the evenings. It's cruel and unjust on my part, but let me commit that injustice. It's an agony for me at home. As soon as the sun disappears, my spirit begins to be weighed down by depression. What depression! Don't ask why. I myself don't know. I swear by God's truth I don't know. Here I'm in anguish, I go to the Lebedevs and there it's still worse; I return from there and here it's depression again, and so all night... Simply despair!"

"And only now, when he was gray-haired, had he fallen in love properly, thoroughly, for the first time in his life."

"The thirst for powerful sensations takes the upper hand both over fear and over compassion for the grief of others."

"Lice consume grass, rust consumes iron, and lying the soul!"

"Medicine is my lawful wife and literature my mistress; when I get tired of one, I spend the night with the other."

"To leave town, and the struggle and the swim of life, and go and hide yourself in a farmhouse is not life -- it is egoism, laziness; it is a kind of monasticism, but monasticism without action. A man needs, not six feet of land, not a farm, but the whole earth, all Nature, where in full liberty he can display all the properties and qualities of the free spirit."

"Wisdom.... comes not from age, but from education and learning."

"Existence is tedious, anyway."

"Anna Petrovna: Do you know what, Kolya? Try and sing, laugh, get angry, as you once did... You stay in, we'll laugh and drink fruit liqueur and we'll drive away your depression in a flash. I'll sing if you like. Or else let's go and sit in the dark in your study as we used to, and you'll tell me about your depression... You have such suffering eyes. I'll look into them and cry, and we'll both feel better."

"I long to embrace, to include in my own short life, all that is accessible to man."

"If you cry 'forward', you must without fail make plain in what direction to go."

"The past,' he thought, 'is linked with the present by an unbroken chain of events flowing one out of another.' And it seemed to him that he had just seen both ends of that chain; that when he touched one end the other quivered."

"With total rapture and delight he talks about the birds which he can see from his prison window, and which he had never noticed before, when he was a minister. Now of course, after he's been released, he doesn't notice the birds anymore, just as beforehand. In the same way you won't notice Moscow, when you actually live there."

"I promise to be an excellent husband, but give me a wife who, like the moon, will not appear every day in my sky."

"When people are ashamed they hold aloof, above all from those nearest to them, and are unreserved with strangers."

"The University brings out all abilities, including incapability."

"You don't understand, you fool' says Yegor, looking dreamily up at the sky. 'You've never understood what kind of person I am, nor will you in a million years... You just think I'm a mad person who has thrown his life away... Once the free spirit has taken hold of a man, there's no way of getting it out of him."

"Lebedev: A time has come of sorrow and sadness for you. Man, my dear friend, is like a samovar. It doesn't always stand on a shelf in the chill but sometimes they put hot coals in it and it goes psh... psh! This comparison is worthless but you won't think up a cleverer one."

"If you want to work on your acting, work on yourself."

"Life does not agree with philosophy: There is no happiness that is not idleness, and only what is useless is pleasurable."

"Only one who loves can remember so well."

"Doctors are just the same as lawyers; the only difference is that lawyers merely rob you, whereas doctors rob you and kill you too."

"And the existence is tedious, anyway; it is a senseless, dirty business, this life."

"But if we reason it out simply and not try to be one bit fancy, then what sort of pride can you possibly take or what's the sense of ever having it, if man is poorly put together as a physiological type and if the enormous majority of the human race is brutal, stupid, and profoundly unhappy?"

"Once a man gets a fixed idea, there's nothing to be done."

"Don't forget either, you unhappy man, that voluntary confinement is a great deal harder to bear than compulsory."

"People who lead a lonely existence always have something on their minds that they are eager to talk about."

"When a woman isn't beautiful, people always say, 'You have lovely eyes, you have lovely hair.'"

"No matter how corrupt and unjust a convict may be, he loves fairness more than anything else. If the people placed over him are unfair, from year to year he lapses into an embittered state characterized by an extreme lack of faith."

"Dear and most respected bookcase! I welcome your existence, which has for over one hundred years been devoted to the radiant ideals of goodness and justice."

"There will come a time when everybody will know why, for what purpose, there is all this suffering, and there will be no more mysteries. But now we must live ... we must work, just work!"

"Country life has its advantages,' he used to say. 'You sit on the veranda drinking tea and your ducklings swim on the pond, and everything smells good. . . and there are gooseberries."

"The world is, of course, nothing but our conception of it."

"The sea has neither meaning nor pity."

"The only difference between doctors and lawyers is that lawyers merely rob you, whereas doctors rob you and kill you, too."

"Podtyagin considers whether to take offence or not -- and decides to take offence."

"For God's sake, have some self-respect and do not run off at the mouth if your brain is out to lunch."

"It was hard and sour, but, as Poushkin said, the illusion which exalts us is dearer to us than ten thousand truths. I saw a happy man, one whose dearest dream had come true, who had attained his goal in life, who had got what he wanted, and was pleased with his destiny and with himself."

"His reading suggested a man swimming in the sea among the wreckage of his ship, and trying to save his life by greedily clutching first at one spar and then at another."

"You have lost your reason and taken the wrong path. You have taken lies for truth, and hideousness for beauty. You would marvel if, owing to strange events of some sorts, frogs and lizards suddenly grew on apple and orange trees instead of fruit, or if roses began to smell like a sweating horse; so I marvel at you who exchange heaven for earth. I don't want to understand you."

"HELENA. What a fine day! Not too hot. [A pause.]VOITSKI. A fine day to hang oneself."

"And I despise your books, I despise wisdom and the blessings of this world. It is all worthless, fleeting, illusory, and deceptive, like a mirage. You may be proud, wise, and fine, but death will wipe you off the face of the earth as though you were no more than mice burrowing under the floor, and your posterity, your history, your immortal geniuses will burn or freeze together with the earthly globe."

"A woman can become a man's friend only in the following stages - first an acquantaince, next a mistress, and only then a friend."

"MASHA. Just think, I am already beginning to forget her face. People will not remember us either. They will forget.VERSHININ. Yes. They will forget. That is our fate, you can't do anything about it. The things which to us seem serious, significant, very important, - the time will come - they will be forgotten or they will seem of no consequence."

"When describing nature, a writer should seize upon small details, arranging them so that the reader will see an image in his mind after he closes his eyes. For instance: you will capture the truth of a moonlit night if you'll write that a gleam like starlight shone from the pieces of a broken bottle, and then the dark, plump shadow of a dog or wolf appeared. You will bring life to nature only if you don't shrink from similes that liken its activities to those of human."