Man is tormented by no greater anxiety than to find someone quickly to whom he can hand over that great gift of freedom with which the ill-fated creature is born.

People with new ideas, people with the faintest capacity for saying something new, are extremely few in number, extraordinarily so, in fact.

A widow, the mother of a family, and from her heart she produces chords to which my whole being responds.

I'm drunk but truthful.

In a morbid condition of the brain, dreams often have a singular actuality, vividness, and extraordinary semblance of reality.

Let us not forget that the reasons for human actions are usually incalculably more complex and diverse than we tend to explain them later, and are seldom clearly manifest.

It suddenly seemed to me that I was lonely, that every one was forsaking me and going away from me. Of course, any one is entitled to ask who "every one" was. For though I had been living almost eight years in Petersburg I had hardly an acquaintance. But what did I want with acquaintances? I was acquainted with all Petersburg as it was.