“A man's perishing here, a man's vanishing from his own sight here, and can't control himself--what sort of wedding can there be!”

“If we're to come to love a man, the man himself should stay hidden, because as soon as he shows his face--love vanishes.”

“A wise man can't seriously make himself anything, only a fool makes himself anything.”

“His position at that moment was like the position of a man standing over a frightful precipice, when the earth breaks away under him, is rocking, shifting, sways for a last time, and falls, drawing him into the abyss, and meanwhile the unfortunate man has neither the strength nor the firmness of spirit to jump back, to take his eyes from the yawning chasm; the abyss draws him, and he finally leaps into it himself, himself hastening the moment of his own perdition.”

“Thus a man will sometimes suffer half an hour of mortal fear with a robber, but once the knife is finally at his throat, even fear vanishes.”

“Anyone who can appease a man's conscience can take his freedom away from him.”

“There are certain things in a man's past which he does not divulge to everybody but, perhaps, only to his friends. Again there are certain things he will not divulge even to his friends; he will divulge them perhaps only to himself, and that, too, as a secret. But, finally, there are things which he is afraid to divulge even to himself, and every decent man has quite an accumulation of such things in his mind. I can put it even this way: the more decent a man is, the larger will the number of such things be.”