Podtyagin considers whether to take offence or not – and decides to take offence.
My holy of holies is the human body.
In descriptions of nature one must seize on small details, grouping them so that when the reader closes his eyes he gets a picture.
An artist observes, selects, guesses, and synthesizes.
Better to perish from fools than to accept praises from them.
I have the feeling that I’ve seen everything, but failed to notice the elephants.
Art, especially the stage, is an area where it is impossible to walk without stumbling.
If our life has a meaning, an aim, it has nothing to do with our personal happiness, but something wiser and greater.
The world is a fine place. The only thing wrong with it is us. How little justice and humility there is in us, how poorly we understand patriotism!
There are plenty of good people, but only a very, very few are precise and disciplined.
If you can’t distinguish people from lap-dogs, you shouldn’t undertake philanthropic work.
Not one of our mortal gauges is suitable for evaluating non-existence, for making judgments about that which is not a person.
If many remedies are prescribed for an illness you can be sure it has no cure.
If in the first act you introduce a gun, by the third act you have to use it.
There is nothing more vapid than a philistine petty bourgeois existence with its farthings, victuals, vacuous conversations, and useless conventional virtue.
Eyes – the head’s chief of police. They watch and make mental notes.
To make a face from marble means to remove from the slab everything that is not the face.
Every person lives his real, most interesting life under the cover of secrecy.
The wealthy man is not he who has money, but he who has the means to live in the luxurious state of early spring.
The unhappy are egotistical, base, unjust, cruel, and even less capable of understanding one another than are idiots. Unhappinessdoes not unite people, but separates them.
The desire to serve the common good must without fail be a requisite of the soul, a necessity for personal happiness; if it issuesnot from there, but from theoretical or other considerations, it is not at all the same thing.