We are accustomed to live in hopes of good weather, a good harvest, a nice love-affair, hopes of becoming rich or getting the office of chief of police, but I've never noticed anyone hoping to get wiser. We say to ourselves: it'll be better under a new tsar, and in two hundred years it'll still be better, and nobody tries to make this good time come tomorrow. On the whole, life gets more and more complex every day and moves on its own sweet will, and people get more and more stupid, and get isolated from life in ever-increasing numbers.

He is an emancipated thinker who is not afraid to write foolish things.

My holy of holies is the human body.

I don't like being successful; the subjects which sit in my head are annoyed and jealous of what has already been written.

And what does it mean -- dying? Perhaps man has a hundred senses, and only the five we know are lost at death, while the other ninety-five remain alive.

It's easier to ask for money from the poor than from the wealthy.

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