Even a stone has its uses, and man who is the most intelligent of all creatures must be of some use, hasn't he?
Do we ever get what we really want? Do we ever achieve what our powers have ostensibly equipped us for? No: everything works by contraries.
I am who I am and that's who I am
You can't imagine how stupid the whole world has grown nowadays.
Keep not money, but keep good people's company.
But nothing is permanent in this world. Joy in the second moment of its arrival is already less keen than in the first, is still fainter in the third, and finishes by coalescing with our normal mental...
And could a man sink to such triviality, such meanness, such nastiness? Could he change so much? And is it true to life? Yes, it is all true to life. All this can happen to a man. The ardent youth of...
A quiet room with cockroaches peeping out like prunes from every corner...
What grief is not taken away by time? What passion will survive an unequal battle with it? I knew a man in the bloom of his still youthful powers, filled with true nobility and virtue, I knew him when...
They don’t listen to me, they don’t hear me, they don’t see me.
The current generation now sees everything clearly, it marvels at the errors, it laughs at the folly of its ancestors, not seeing that this chronicle is all overscored by divine fire, that every lette...
Like all of us sinners, General Betrishchev was endowed with many virtues and many defects. Both the one and the other were scattered through him in a sort of picturesque disorder. Self-sacrifice, mag...
It is no use to blame the looking glass if your face is awry.
But youth has a future. The closer he came to graduation, the more his heart beat. He said to himself: This is still not life, this is only the preparation for life.
But nothing is lasting in this world. Even joy begins to fade after only one minute. Two minutes later, and it is weaker still, until finally it is swallowed up in our everyday, prosaic state of mind,...
This was not the old Chichikov. This was some wreckage of the old Chichikov. The inner state of his soul might be compared to a demolished building, which has been demolished so that from it a new one...
Every man who has lived in the world and mixed with his fellow men will have remarked something which has remained hidden from the eyes of others;