If we wait for the moment when everything, absolutely everything is ready, we shall never begin.

The temerity to believe in nothing.

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

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.

Even nightingales can’t be fed on fairy tales.

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

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.