To tell about a drunken muzhik's beating his wife is incomparably harder than to compose a whole tract about the 'woman question.'

Nothing is worse and more hurtful than a happiness that comes too late.

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'm incapable of describing the feeling with which I left. I wouldn't want it ever to be repeated, but I would have considered myself unfortunate if I'd never experienced it.

I believe love produces a certain flowering of the whole personality which nothing else can achieve.

A son is like a lopped off branch. As a falcon he comes when he wills and goes where he lists.

I look up to heaven only when I want to sneeze.