What is hell?...The suffering that comes from the consciousness that one is no longer able to love.

Pass us by, and forgive us our happiness

Through error you come to the truth! I am a man because I err! You never reach any truth without making fourteen mistakes and very likely a hundred and fourteen.

Russians alone are able to combine so many opposites in themselves at one and the same time.

Listen, in dreams and especially in nightmares, from indigestion or anything, a man sees sometimes such artistic visions, such complex and real actuality, such events, even a whole world of events, woven into such a plot, with such unexpected details from the most exalted matters to the last button on a cuff, as I swear Leo Tolstoy has never invented.

What does reason know? Reason only knows what it has succeeded in learning.

It seems, in fact, as though the second half of a man's life is made up of nothing, but the habits he has accumulated during the first half.