Everything on earth is beautiful, everything -- except what we ourselves think and do when we forget the higher purposes of life and our own human dignity.

Medicine is my lawful wife and literature my mistress; when I get tired of one, I spend the night with the other.

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...

The stupider the peasant, the better the horse understands him.

I was so drunk the whole time that I took bottles for girls and girls for bottles.

It is always "Youth, youth," when there is nothing else to be said.

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