A word aptly uttered or written cannot be cut away by an axe.

Like all of us sinners, General Betrishchev was endowed with many virtues and many defects. Both the one and the other were scattered through him in a sort of picturesque disorder. Self-sacrifice, magnanimity in decisive moments, courage, intelligence--and with all that, a generous mixture of self-love, ambition, vanity, petty personal ticklishness, and a good many of those things which a man simply cannot do without.

How much savage coarseness is concealed in refined, cultivated manners.

It's the most righteous, which of course is not the same thing as the most profitable.

But youth has a future. The closer he came to graduation, the more his heart beat. He said to himself: “This is still not life, this is only the preparation for life.

There exists a kind of laughter which is worthy to be ranked with the higher lyric emotions and is infinitely different from the twitching of a mean merrymaker.

it's not my job to preach a sermon. Art is anyhow a homily. My job is to speak in living images, not in arguments. I must exhibit life full-face, not discuss life.