We ought to thank God for that. Yes, the man who tills the land is more worthy of respect than any.

I shall laugh my bitter laugh.

Nothing could be more pleasant than to live in solitude, enjoy the spectacle of nature, and occasionally read some book.

I saw that I'd get nowhere on the straight path, and that to go crookedly was straighter.

Keep not money, but keep good people's company.

Like all of us sinners, General Betrishchev was endowed with many virtues and many defects. Both the one and the other were scattered through him in a sort of picturesque disorder. Self-sacrifice, magnanimity in decisive moments, courage, intelligence--and with all that, a generous mixture of self-love, ambition, vanity, petty personal ticklishness, and a good many of those things which a man simply cannot do without.

I am very fond of the modest manner of life of those solitary owners of remote villages, who in Little Russia are commonly called "old-fashioned," who are like tumbledown picturesque little houses, delightful in their simplicity and complete unlikeness to the new smooth buildings whose walls have not yet been discolored by the rain, whose roofs are not yet covered with green lichen, and whose porch does not display its bricks through the peeling stucco.