Do we ever get what we really want? Do we ever achieve what our powers have ostensibly equipped us for? No: everything works by contraries.

I saw that I'd get nowhere on the straight path, and that to go crookedly was straighter.

Countless as the sands of sea are human passions, and not all of them are alike, and all of them, base and noble alike, are at first obedient to man and only later on become his terrible masters.

What are you laughing at? You are laughing at yourself.

In the end dreams became his life, and his whole life thereafter took a strange turn: one might say he slept while waking and watched while asleep.

In the course of reading he [Alexander Pushkin] became more and more melancholy and finally became completely gloomy. When the reading was over he uttered in a voice full of sorrow: "Goodness, how sad is our Russia!"

They don’t listen to me, they don’t hear me, they don’t see me.