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

"Perhaps the feelings that we experience when we are in love represent a normal state. Being in love shows a person who he should be."

"What is there flattering, amusing, or edifying in their carving your name on a tombstone, then time rubbing off the inscription together with the gilding?"

"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?"

"Formerly, when I would feel a desire to understand someone, or myself, I would take into consideration not actions, in which everything is relative, but wishes. Tell me what you want and I'll tell you who you are."

"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."

"Faith is an aptitude of the spirit. It is, in fact, a talent: you must be born with it."

"My own experience is that once a story has been written one has to cross out the beginning and the end. It is there that we authors do most of our lying . . . one must ruthlessly suppress everything that is not concerned with the subject. If in the first chapter you say there is a gun hanging on the wall you should make quite sure that it is going to be used further on in the story."

"Ivanov: Gentlemen, you've again set up a drinking shop in my study... I have asked each and every one of you a thousand times not to do that... Look now, you've spilt vodka on a paper... and there are crumbs... and gherkins... It's disgusting!"

"When an actor has money he doesn't send letters, he sends telegrams."

"Conciseness is the sister of talent."

"A man and a woman marry because both of them don't know what to do with themselves."

"They say philosophers and wise men are indifferent. Wrong. Indifference is a paralysis of the soul, a premature death."

"People don't notice whether it's winter or summer when they're happy."

"Even in Siberia there is happiness."

"To advise is not to compel."

"The illusion which exalts us is dearer to us than ten thousand truths."

"Money, like vodka, turns a person into an eccentric."

"Let us learn to appreciate there will be times when the trees will be bare, and look forward to the time when we may pick the fruit."

"A writer is not a confectioner, a cosmetic dealer, or an entertainer."

"We learn about life not from plusses alone, but from minuses as well."

"To torment and tantalize oneself with hopes of possible fortune is so sweet, so thrilling!"

"Ivanov: With a heavy head, with a slothful spirit, exhausted, overstretched, broken, without faith, without love, without a goal, I roam like a shadow among men and I don't know who I am, why I'm alive, what I want. And I now think that love is nonsense, that embraces are cloying, that there's no sense in work, that song and passionate speeches are vulgar and outmoded. And everywhere I take with me depression, chill boredom, dissatisfaction, revulsion from life... I am destroyed, irretrievably!"

"Happiness does not exist, nor should it, and if there is any meaning or purpose in life, they are not in our peddling little happiness, but in something reasonable and grand. Do good!"

"Every personal existence was upheld by a secret."

"I've never been in love. I've dreamt of it day and night, but my heart is like a fine piano no one can play because the key is lost."

"True happiness is impossible without solitude. The fallen angel probably betrayed God because he longed for solitude, which angels do not know."

"We just philosophize, complain of boredom, or drink vodka. It's so clear, you see, that if we're to begin living in the present, we must first of all redeem our past and then be done with it forever. And the only way we can redeem our past is by suffering and by giving ourselves over to exceptional labor, to steadfast and endless labor."

"Love, friendship and respect do not unite people as much as a common hatred for something."

"Why are we worn out? Why do we, who start out so passionate, brave, noble, believing, become totally bankrupt by the age of thirty or thirty-five? Why is it that one is extinguished by consumption, another puts a bullet in his head, a third seeks oblivion in vodka, cards, a fourth, in order to stifle fear and anguish, cynically tramples underfoot the portrait of his pure, beautiful youth? Why is it that, once fallen, we do not try to rise, and, having lost one thing, we do not seek another? Why?"

"The sufferings which may be observed nowadays - they are so widespread and so vast - but people speak nevertheless about a certain moral improvement which society has achieved."

"Advertising is the very essence of democracy."

"One must be a god to be able to tell successes from failures without making a mistake."

"Except for two or three older writers, all modern literature seems to me not literature but some sort of handicraft, which exists only so as to be encouraged, though one is reluctant to use its products."

"Going to see plays isn't what you people should do. Try looking at yourselves a little more often and see what gray lives you all lead. How much of what you say is unnecessary."

"I long to embrace, to include in my own short life, all that is accessible to man. I long to speak, to read, to wield a hammer in a great factory, to keep watch at sea, to plow. I want to be walking along the Nevsky Prospect, or in the open fields, or on the ocean - wherever my imagination ranges."

"The Lie which elates us is dearer than a thousand sober truths."