It is the writer's business not to accuse and not to prosecute, but to champion the guilty, once they are condemned and suffer punishment.

To believe in God is not hard. Inquisitors, Byron and Arakcheev believed in Him. No, believe in man!

The sea has neither meaning nor pity.

I have no faith in our hypocritical, false, hysterical, uneducated and lazy intelligentsia when they suffer and complain: their oppression comes from within. I believe in individual people. I see salvation in discrete individuals, intellectuals and peasants, strewn hither and yon throughout Russia. They have the strength, although there are few of them.

There are plenty of good people, but only a very, very few are precise and disciplined.

A fiancé is neither this nor that: he's left one shore, but not yet reached the other.

It is easier to ask of the poor than of the rich.