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

In the end, nature is inexorable: it has no reason to hurry and, sooner or later, it takes what belongs to it. Unconsciously and inflexibly obedient to its own laws, it doesn't know art, just as it doesn't know freedom, just as it doesn't know goodness.

Anyone who has crossed from the district of Bolkhov into that of Zhizdra will probably have been struck by the sharp difference between the natives of the provinces of Orel and Kaluga.

I don't see why it's impossible to express everything that's on one's mind.

The temerity to believe in nothing.

Don't force me into saying what I don't want to say, and what I won't say.

However much you knock at nature's door, she will never answer you in comprehensible words.