To judge between good or bad, between successful and unsuccessful would take the eye of a God.

People don't notice whether it's winter or summer when they're happy.

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.

Country acquaintances are charming only in the country and only in the summer. In the city in winter they lose half of their appeal.

If there is a gun hanging on the wall in the first act, it must fire in the last.

The leaves did not stir on the trees, grasshoppers chirruped, and the monotonous hollow sound of the sea rising up from below, spoke of the peace, of the eternal sleep awaiting us. So it must have sounded when there was no Yalta, no Oreanda here; so it sounds now, and it will sound as indifferently and monotonously when we are all no more. And in this constancy, in this complete indifference to the life and death of each of us, there lies hid, perhaps, a pledge of our eternal salvation, of the unceasing movement of life upon earth, of unceasing progress towards perfection.

Fine. Since the tea is not forthcoming, let's have a philosophical conversation.