Anna Petrovna: Never talk to women about your own good qualities. Let them find out for themselves.
Oh, dreams! In one night, lying with one’s eyes shut, one may sometimes live through more than ten years of happiness.
A sweet lie is more gracious for us than a virulent but real truth.
I should think I’m going to be a perpetual student.
Happiness does not await us all. One needn’t be a prophet to say that there will be more grief and pain than serenity and money. That is why we must hang on to one another.
When one longs for a drink, it seems as though one could drink a whole ocean-that is faith; but when one begins to drink, one can only drink altogether two glasses-that is science.
Once a man gets a fixed idea, there’s nothing to be done.
One must not put a loaded rifle on the stage if no one is thinking of firing it.
One must never place a loaded rifle on the stage if it isn’t going to go off. It’s wrong to make promises you don’t mean to keep.
Please, understand that your life is bad and dreary!
We learn about life not from plusses alone, but from minuses as well.
The stupider the peasant, the better the horse understands him.
All saints have pasts and all sinners have a future.
If in the first act you have hung a pistol on the wall, then in the following one it should be fired. Otherwise don’t put it there.
When men ask me how I know so much about men, they get a simple answer: everything I know about men, I learned from me.
There ought to be a man with a hammer behind the door of every happy man.
There is no national science, just as there is no national multiplication table; what is national is no longer science.
Every coming year is as bad as the previous one, the only difference being that in most cases it is even worse.
It’s very hard, feeling that you’re no more than a piece of unwanted furniture in this world.
It’s better to live down a scandal than to ruin one’s life.