We forget that Socrates was famed for wisdom not because he was omniscient but because he realized at the age of seventy that he still knew nothing.

This is woman's great benevolence, that she will become a martyr for beauty, so that the world may have pleasure.

There is nothing in which the birds differ more from man than the way in which they can build and yet leave a landscape as it was before.

Chekhov will seek out the key situation in the life of a cabman or a charwoman, and make them glow for a brief moment in the tender light of his sympathy.

When one has praised Turgenev, however, for the beauty of his character and the beautiful truth of his art, one remembers that he, too, was human and therefore less than perfect. His chief failing was, perhaps, that of all the great artists, he was the most lacking in exuberance. That is why he began to be scorned in a world which rated exuberance higher than beauty or love or pity.

No man is uninteresting when his hat is blown off and he has to scuttle after it down the street.

It is the custom when praising a Russian writer to do so at the expense of all other Russian writers.