Women... can't live with 'em... can't shoot 'em.

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

Take for yourself what you can, and don’t be ruled by others; to belong to oneself – the whole savour of life lies in that.

Every single man hangs by a thread, a bottomless pit can open beneath him any minute, and yet he still goes on thinking up unpleasantnesses for himself and making a mess of his life.

Nowhere does time pass as swiftly as in Russia, though they say that in prison it passes even more quickly.

There are none so easily carried away as those who are without passion.

Oh we have hard times to live through, those of us who are born spectators.

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

Strange things happen on this earth: you can live a long while with someone and be on the friendliest of terms, and yet you’ll never once talk openly with him, from the depths of your soul; while with someone else you may scarcely have met, at one glance, whether you to him or he to you, just as in a confessional, you’ll blurt out the story of your life.

Words indeed have been my ruin; they have consumed me, and to the end I cannot be free of them.