Anna Petrovna: Never talk to women about your own good qualities. Let them find out for themselves.

I've noticed that people who get married cease to be curious.

I do not know why one should not hunt two hares even in the literal sense....

Life does not agree with philosophy: There is no happiness that is not idleness, and only what is useless is pleasurable.

In nature a repulsive caterpillar turns into a lovely butterfly. But with human beings it is the other way round: a lovely butterfly turns into a repulsive caterpillar.

In displaying the psychology of your characters, minute particulars are essential. God save us from vague generalizations!

He had two lives: one, open, seen and known by all who cared to know, full of relative truth and of relative falsehood, exactly like the lives of his friends and acquaintances; and another life running its course in secret. And through some strange, perhaps accidental, conjunction of circumstances, everything that was essential, of interest and of value to him, everything in which he was sincere and did not deceive himself, everything that made the kernel of his life, was hidden from other people.