“Q: What is the best thing men do? A: To be kind, to be proud, to be fearless.”

“...we shall connect the points, draw the line, and you and I shall form that unique design for which I yearn. If they do this kind of thing to me every morning, they will get me trained and I shall become quite wooden.”

“...All my best words are deserters and do not answer the trumpet call, and the remainder are cripples.”

“I am sufficiently proud of my knowing something to be modest about my not knowing all.”

“Although I could never get used to the constant state of anxiety in which the guilty, the great, and the tenderhearted live, I felt I was doing my best in the way of mimicry.”

“We are liable to miss the best of life if we do not know how to tingle, if we do not learn to hoist ourselves just a little higher than we generally are in order to sample the rarest and ripest fruit of art which human thought has to offer.”

“It is nothing but a kind of microcosmos of communism—all that psychiatry,' rumbled Pnin, in his answer to Chateau. 'Why not leave their private sorrows to people? Is sorrow not, one asks, the only thing in the world people really possess?”