Two and two make four. Nature doesn't ask your advice. She isn't interested in your preferences or whether or not you approve of her laws. You must accept nature as she is with all the consequences that that implies.

You are a man still young, so to say, in your first youth and so put intellect above everything.

But gamblers know how a man can sit for almost twenty-four hours at cards, without looking to right, or to left.

"I love mankind," he said, "but I find to my amazement that the more I love mankind as a whole, the less I love man in particular."

In summer, intolerable closeness; in winter, unendurable cold. All the floors were rotten. Filth on the floors an inch thick; one could slip and fall.

How does it come about that what an intelligent man expresses is much stupider than what remains inside him?

Such power!" Adelaida cried all at once, peering greedily at the portrait over her sister's shoulder. "Where? What power?" Lizaveta Prokofyevna asked sharply. "Such beauty has power," Adelaida said hotly. "You can overturn the world with such beauty.