"It doesn’t matter that your painting is small. Kopecks are also small, but when a lot are put together they make a ruble. Each painting displayed in a gallery and each good book that makes it into a library, no matter how small they may be, serve a great cause: accretion of the national wealth."

"Children are holy and pure. Even those of bandits and crocodiles belong among the angels.... They must not be turned into a plaything of one’s mood, first to be tenderly kissed, then rabidly stomped at."

"Of course politics is an interesting and engrossing thing. It offers no immutable laws, nearly always prevaricates, but as far as blather and sharpening the mind go, it provides inexhaustible material."

"In one-act pieces there should be only rubbish—that is their strength."

"Narrative prose is a legal wife, while drama is a posturing, boisterous, cheeky and wearisome mistress."

"Everything is good in due measure and strong sensations know not measure."

"Lermontov died at age twenty-eight and wrote more than have you and I put together. Talent is recognizable not only by quality, but also by the quantity it yields."

"Neither I nor anyone else knows what a standard is. We all recognize a dishonorable act, but have no idea what honor is."

"Brevity is the sister of talent."

"Everyone judges plays as if they were very easy to write. They don’t know that it is hard to write a good play, and twice as hard and tortuous to write a bad one."

"When performing an autopsy, even the most inveterate spiritualist would have to question where the soul is."

"Beware of exquisite language. The language should be simple and elegant."

"Life is difficult for those who have the daring to first set out on an unknown road. The avant-garde always has a bad time of it."

"When a person doesn’t understand something, he feels internal discord: however he doesn’t search for that discord in himself, as he should, but searches outside of himself. Thence a war develops with that which he doesn’t understand."

"Without a knowledge of languages you feel as if you don’t have a passport."

"Wherever there is degeneration and apathy, there also is sexual perversion, cold depravity, miscarriage, premature old age, grumbling youth, there is a decline in the arts, indifference to science, and injustice in all its forms."

"I drank so much in Peter that Russia should be proud of me!"

"In general, Russia suffers from a frightening poverty in the sphere of facts and a frightening wealth of all types of arguments."

"There are no lower or higher or median moralities. There is only one morality, and it is precisely the one that was given to us during the time of Jesus Christ and that stops me, you and Barantsevich from stealing, offending others, lying etc."

"I divide all literary works into two categories: Those I like and those I don’t like. No other criterion exists for me."

"One can only call that youth healthful which refuses to be reconciled to old ways and which, foolishly or shrewdly, combats the old. This is nature’s charge and all progress hinges upon it."

"The world is a fine place. The only thing wrong with it is us. How little justice and humility there is in us, how poorly we understand patriotism!"

"I think that it would be less difficult to live eternally than to be deprived of sleep throughout life."

"In my opinion it is harmful to place important things in the hands of philanthropy, which in Russia is marked by a chance character. Nor should important matters depend on leftovers, which are never there. I would prefer that the government treasury take care of it."

"One had better not rush, otherwise dung comes out rather than creative work."

"All great sages are as despotic as generals, and as ungracious and indelicate as generals, because they are confident of their impunity."

"He who constantly swims in the ocean loves dry land."

"We old bachelors smell like dogs, do we? So be it. But I must take issue with your claim that doctors who treat female illnesses are womanizers and cynics at heart. Gynecologists deal with savage prose the likes of which you have never dreamed of."

"Satiation, like any state of vitality, always contains a degree of impudence, and that impudence emerges first and foremost when the sated man instructs the hungry one."

"Can words such as Orthodox, Jew, or Catholic really express some sort of exclusive personal virtues or merits?"

"An expansive life, one not constrained by four walls, requires as well an expansive pocket."

"When we retreat to the country, we are hiding not from people, but from our pride, which, in the city and among people, operates unfairly and immoderately."

"People understand God as the expression of the most lofty morality. Maybe He needs only perfect people."

"The wealthy man is not he who has money, but he who has the means to live in the luxurious state of early spring."

"There is nothing more vapid than a philistine petty bourgeois existence with its farthings, victuals, vacuous conversations, and useless conventional virtue."

"Despicable means used to achieve laudable goals render the goals themselves despicable."

"The more elevated a culture, the richer its language. The number of words and their combinations depends directly on a sum of conceptions and ideas; without the latter there can be no understandings, no definitions, and, as a result, no reason to enrich a language."

"The person who wants nothing, hopes for nothing, and fears nothing can never be an artist."

"Whoever sincerely believes that elevated and distant goals are as little use to man as a cow, that “all of our problems” come from such goals, is left to eat, drink, sleep, or, when he gets sick of that, to run up to a chest and smash his forehead on its corner."

"I abide by a rule concerning reviews: I will never ask, neither in writing nor in person, that a word be put in about my book.... One feels cleaner this way. When someone asks that his book be reviewed he risks running up against a vulgarity offensive to authorial sensibilities."

"When you live on cash, you understand the limits of the world around which you navigate each day. Credit leads into a desert with invisible boundaries."

"It’s easier to write about Socrates than about a young woman or a cook."

"Prudence and justice tell me that in electricity and steam there is more love for man than in chastity and abstinence from meat."

"The air of one’s native country is the most healthy air."

"I would love to meet a philosopher like Nietzsche on a train or boat and to talk with him all night. Incidentally, I don’t consider his philosophy long-lived. It is not so much persuasive as full of bravura."

"I can’t accept “our nervous age,” since mankind has been nervous during every age. Whoever fears nervousness should turn into a sturgeon or smelt; if a sturgeon makes a stupid mistake, it can only be one: to end up on a hook, and then in a pan in a pastry shell."

"Sports are positively essential. It is healthy to engage in sports, they are beautiful and liberal, liberal in the sense that nothing serves quite as well to integrate social classes, etc., than street or public games."