“..when one has no real life, one lives by mirages. It's still better than nothing.”

“It's better to live down a scandal than to ruin one's life.”

“Oh, dreams! In one night, lying with one's eyes shut, one may sometimes live through more than ten years of happiness.”

“Useless pursuits and conversations always about the same things absorb the better part of one's time, the better part of one's strength, and in the end there is left a life grovelling and curtailed, worthless and trivial, and there is no escaping or getting away from it—just as though one were in a madhouse or prison.”

“Lebedev: ...There'll be a scandal, the tongues of the whole district will buzz with gossip, but it's better to go through a scandal, isn't it, than to destroy yourself for your whole life.”

“Do you see that tree? It is dead but it still sways in the wind with the others. I think it would be like that with me. That if I died I would still be part of life in one way or another.”

“We are accustomed to live in hopes of good weather, a good harvest, a nice love-affair, hopes of becoming rich or getting the office of chief of police, but I've never noticed anyone hoping to get wiser. We say to ourselves: it'll be better under a new tsar, and in two hundred years it'll still be better, and nobody tries to make this good time come tomorrow. On the whole, life gets more and more complex every day and moves on its own sweet will, and people get more and more stupid, and get isolated from life in ever-increasing numbers.”