Without a knowledge of languages you feel as if you don't have a passport..

If I were asked to chose between execution and life in prison I would, of course, chose the latter. It's better to live somehow than not at all..

It seems to me that all of the evil in life comes from idleness, boredom, and psychic emptiness, but all of that is inevitable when you become accust….

By nature servile, people attempt at first glance to find signs of good breeding in the appearance of those who occupy more exalted stations..

The leaves did not stir on the trees, grasshoppers chirruped, and the monotonous hollow sound of the sea rising up from below, spoke of the peace, of….

Only one who loves can remember so well..

It is time for writers to admit that nothing in this world makes sense. Only fools and charlatans think they know and understand everything. The stup….

...and with a burning pain in my heart I realized how unnecessary, how petty, and how deceptive all that had hindered us from loving was. I understoo….

I can only regard with bewilderment an educated man who is also religious.

An actress without talent, forty years old, ate a partridge for dinner, and I felt sorry for the partridge, for it occurred to me that in its life it….

What a delight it is to respect people!.

Nothing better forges a bond of love, friendship or respect than common hatred toward something..

I feel more confident and more satisfied when I reflect that I have two professions and not one. Medicine is my lawful wife and literature is my mist….

There are still many more days of failure ahead, whole seasons of failure, things will go terribly wrong, you will have huge disappointments , but yo….

Oh, I have now a mania for shortness. Whatever I read - my own or other people's works - it all seems to me not short enough..

..when one has no real life, one lives by mirages. It's still better than nothing..

"Do you know," Ivan Bunin recalls Anton Chekhov saying to him in 1899, near the end of his too-short life, "for how many years I shall be read? Seven….

The more refined one is, the more unhappy..

To Moscow, to Moscow, to Moscow!.

I have the feeling that I've seen everything, but failed to notice the elephants..

A naive man is nothing better than a fool. But you women contrive to be naive in such a way that in you it seems sweet, and gentle, and proper, and n….