Love, I thought, is stronger than death or the fear of death. Only by it, by love, life holds together and advances.

It's all romanticism, nonsense, rottenness, art.

Illness isn't the only thing that spoils the appetite.

I do not know what the heart of a bad man is like. But i do know what the heart of a good man is like. And it is terrible.

He went to bed early, but could not fall asleep. He was haunted by sad and gloomy reflections about the inevitable end- death. These thoughts were familiar to him, many times had he turned them over this way and that, first shuddering at the probability of annihilation, then welcoming it, almost rejoicing in it. Suddenly a peculiarly familiar agitation took possession of him... He mused awhile, sat down at the table, and wrote down the following lines in his sacred copy-book, without a single correction.

We Russians have assigned ourselves no other task in life but the cultivation of our own personalities, and when we're barely past childhood, we set to work to cultivate them, those unfortunate personalities.

I only know that I feel tired, antiquated; I feel as though I had been living a long, long time.