Take what you can yourself, and don't let others get you into their hands; to belong to oneself, that is the whole thing in life.

The past was a dream wasn't it? And who ever remembers dreams?

The fact is that previously they were simply dunces and now they've suddenly become nihilists.

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

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

Whereas I think: I’m lying here in a haystack... The tiny space I occupy is so infinitesimal in comparison with the rest of space, which I don’t occupy and which has no relation to me. And the period of time in which I’m fated to live is so insignificant beside the eternity in which I haven’t existed and won’t exist... And yet in this atom, this mathematical point, blood is circulating, a brain is working, desiring something... What chaos! What a farce!

I've become convinced that every person should treat himself strictly and even rudely and distrustfully; it's difficult to tame the beast in oneself.