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

"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."

"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."

"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."

"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."

"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."

"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."

"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."

"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."

"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."

"The world perishes not from bandits and fires, but from hatred, hostility, and all these petty squabbles."

"Anna Petrovna: I am beginning to think, doctor, that fate has cheated me. The majority of people, who maybe are no better than I am, are happy and pay nothing for that happiness. I have paid for everything, absolutely everything! And how dearly! Why have I paid such terrible interest?"

"The State is not God. It has not the right to take away what it cannot restore when it wants to."

"If you are afraid of loneliness, do not marry."

"When you're thirsty and it seems that you could drink the entire ocean that's faith; when you start to drink and finish only a glass or two that's science."

"Science and art,... they seek the truth and the meaning of life, they seek God, [and] the soul, and when they are harnessed to passing needs and activities,... then they only complicate and encumber life."

"Any idiot can face a crisis - it's day to day living that wears you out."

"Reason and justice tell me there's more love for humanity in electricity and steam than in chastity and vegetarianism."

"To judge between good or bad, between successful and unsuccessful would take the eye of a God."

"When a lot of remedies are suggested for a disease, that means it can't be cured."

"All of life and human relations have become so incomprehensibly complex that, when you think about it, it becomes terrifying and your heart stands still."

"In short, the man displayed a constant and insurmountable impulse to wrap himself in a covering, to make himself, so to speak, a case which would isolate him and protect him from external influences. Reality irritated him, frightened him, kept him in continual agitation, and, perhaps to justify his timidity, his aversion for the actual, he always praised the past and what had never existed; and even the classical languages which he taught were in reality for him goloshes and umbrellas in which he sheltered himself from real life."

"You must trust and believe in people or life becomes impossible."

"Ivanov: And this whole romance of ours is commonplace and trite: he lost heart, and he lost his way. She came along, strong and brave in spirit, and gave him an helping hand. That's all very well and plausible in novels, but in life...Sasha: In life it's the same.Ivanov: I see you have a fine understanding of life!"

"We shall find peace. We shall hear angels, we shall see the sky sparkling with diamonds."

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