"Not everyone knows when to be silent and when to go. It not infrequently happens that even diplomatic persons of good worldly breeding fail to observe that their presence is arousing a feeling akin to hatred in their exhausted or busy host, and that this feeling is being concealed with an effort and disguised with a lie."

"Each of us is full of too many wheels, screws and valves to permit us to judge one another on a first impression or by two or three external signs."

"Country acquaintances are charming only in the country and only in the summer. In the city in winter they lose half of their appeal."

"One can prove or refute anything at all with words. Soon people will perfect language technology to such an extent that they’ll be proving with mathematical precision that twice two is seven."

"You look at any poetic creature: muslin, ether, demigoddess, millions of delights; then you look into the soul and find the most ordinary crocodile!"

"If you can’t distinguish people from lap-dogs, you shouldn’t undertake philanthropic work."

"The sea has neither meaning nor pity."

"Everyone has the same God; only people differ."

"It is not only the prisoners who grow coarse and hardened from corporeal punishment, but those as well who perpetrate the act or are present to witness it."

"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 is something beautiful, touching and poetic when one person loves more than the other, and the other is indifferent."

"To regard one’s immortality as an exchange of matter is as strange as predicting the future of a violin case once the expensive violin it held has broken and lost its worth."

"Life is a vexatious trap; when a thinking man reaches maturity and attains to full consciousness he cannot help feeling that he is in a trap from which there is no escape."

"It’s even pleasant to be sick when you know that there are people who await your recovery as they might await a holiday."

"There is nothing more awful, insulting, and depressing than banality."

"Pesotsky had an immense house with columns and lions, off which the stucco was peeling, and with a footman in swallow-tails at the entrance. The old park, laid out in the English style, gloomy and severe, stretched for almost three-quarters of a mile to the river, and there ended in a steep, precipitous clay bank, where pines grew with bare roots that looked like shaggy paws; the water shone below with an unfriendly gleam, and the peewits flew up with a plaintive cry, and there one always felt that one must sit down and write a ballad."

"Death can only be profitable: there’s no need to eat, drink, pay taxes, offend people, and since a person lies in a grave for hundreds or thousands of years, if you count it up the profit turns out to be enormous."

"Moscow is a city that has much suffering ahead of it."

"By poeticizing love, we imagine in those we love virtues that they often do not possess; this then becomes the source of constant mistakes and constant distress."

"Good breeding doesn't mean that you won't spill sauce on the tablecloth, but that you won't notice when someone else does."

"It seems to me that all of the evil in life comes from idleness, boredom, and psychic emptiness, but all of that is inevitable when you become accustomed to living at others’ expense."

"Exquisite nature, daydreams, and music say one thing, real life another."

"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."

"Who keeps the tavern and serves up the drinks? The peasant. Who squanders and drinks up money belonging to the peasant commune, the school, the church? The peasant. Who would steal from his neighbor, commit arson, and falsely denounce another for a bottle of vodka? The peasant."

"While you’re playing cards with a regular guy or having a bite to eat with him, he seems a peaceable, good-humoured and not entirely dense person. But just begin a conversation with him about something inedible, politics or science, for instance, and he ends up in a deadend or starts in on such an obtuse and base philosophy that you can only wave your hand and leave."

"There are no small number of people in this world who, solitary by nature, always try to go back into their shell like a hermit crab or a snail."

"People who live alone always have something on their minds that they would willingly share."

"It is uncomfortable to ask condemned people about their sentences just as it is awkward to ask wealthy people why they need so much money, why they use their wealth so poorly, and why they don’t just get rid of it when they recognize that it is the cause of their unhappiness."

"Nature’s law says that the strong must prevent the weak from living, but only in a newspaper article or textbook can this be packaged into a comprehensible thought. In the soup of everyday life, in the mixture of minutia from which human relations are woven, it is not a law. It is a logical incongruity when both strong and weak fall victim to their mutual relations, unconsciously subservient to some unknown guiding power that stands outside of life, irrelevant to man."

"If you really think about it, everything is wonderful in this world, everything except for our thoughts and deeds when we forget about the loftier goals of existence, about our human dignity."

"She read a lot, wrote letters without the letter ъ, …"

"Dear, sweet, unforgettable childhood! Why does this irrevocable time, forever departed, seem brighter, more festive and richer than it actually was?"

"Thought and beauty, like a hurricane or waves, should not know conventional, delimited forms."

"If in the first act you have hung a pistol on the wall, then in the following one it should be fired. Otherwise don't put it there.""

"Between "there is a God" and "there is no God" lies a whole vast tract, which the really wise man crosses with great effort. A Russian knows one or other of these two extremes, and the middle tract between them does not interest him; and therefore he usually knows nothing, or very little. (Diary, 1897)"

"Dinner at the "Continental" to commemorate the great reform [the abolition of the serfdom in 1861]. Tedious and incongruous. To dine, drink champagne, make a racket, and deliver speeches about national consciousness, the conscience of the people, freedom, and such things, while slaves in tail-coats are running round your tables, veritable serfs, and your coachmen wait outside in the street, in the bitter cold—that is lying to the Holy Ghost. (Diary, 9 February 1897)"

"Mankind has conceived history as a series of battles; hitherto it has considered fighting as the main thing in life."

"The desire to serve the common good must without fail be a requisite of the soul, a necessity for personal happiness; if it issues not from there, but from theoretical or other considerations, it is not at all the same thing."

"Solomon made a great mistake when he asked for wisdom."

"Ordinary hypocrites pretend to be doves; political and literary hypocrites pretend to be eagles. But don't be disconcerted by their aquiline appearance. They are not eagles, but rats or dogs."

"It always seems to the brothers and the father that their brother or son didn't marry the right person."

"Love is a great thing. It is not by chance that in all times and practically among all cultured peoples love in the general sense and the love of a man for his wife are both called love. If love is often cruel or destructive, the reason lies not in love itself, but in the inequality between people."

"A nice man would feel ashamed even before a dog."

"There is no national science, just as there is no national multiplication table; what is national is no longer science."

"How pleasant it is to respect people! When I see books, I am not concerned with how the authors loved or played cards; I see only their marvelous works."

"I observed that after marriage people cease to be curious."

"The more refined the more unhappy."

"People love talking of their diseases, although they are the most uninteresting things in their lives."

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

"It is easier to ask of the poor than of the rich."