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

In two or three hundred years life on earth will be unimaginably beautiful, astounding. Man needs such a life and if it hasn't yetappeared, he should begin to anticipate it, wait for it, dream about it, prepare for it. To achieve this, he has to see and know more than did his grandfather and father.

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.

Whoever sincerely believes that elevated and distant goals are as little use to man as a cow, that "all of our problems" come fromsuch 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.

In Moscow you sit in a huge room at a restaurant; you know no one and no one knows you, and at the same time you don't feel a stranger. But here you know everyone and everyone knows you, and yet you are a stranger - a stranger... A stranger, and lonely...

He who desires nothing, hopes for nothing, and is afraid of nothing, cannot be an artist.

Humankind has understood history as a series of battles because, to this day, it regards conflict as the central facet of life.