I am a well-read man, I have studied various remarkable books, but I cannot make out the trend of my preferences. I don't know whether I should live or l, speaking bluntly, shoot myself. But I always carry a revolver in my pocket, just in case.
Explanation:
Translated from the Russian by Kathleen Cook
She loves you — you like her. And I can't make out why you seem to fight shy of each other. I can't understand it!
Explanation:
Translated from the Russian by Kathleen Cook
If very many cures are suggested for any illness, that means it is incurable.
Explanation:
Translated from the Russian by Kathleen Cook
These clever people are all so stupid — there's no one to talk to.
Explanation:
Translated from the Russian by Kathleen Cook
Mankind marches forward, perfecting itself. All that we find unattainable now will some day be near and clear; but we must work, we must do our utmost to help those who seek after truth.
Explanation:
Translated from the Russian by Kathleen Cook
To avoid everything petty, everything illusory, everything that prevents us from being free and happy, that is the whole meaning and purpose of our life.
Explanation:
Translated from the Russian by Kathleen Cook
Explanation:
Translated from the Russian by Kathleen Cook
Why should I be ashamed to own it? I love him, that's plain. I love him. It's like a millstone tied round my neck, it's dragging me down to the bottom, but I love my stone and can't live without it.
Explanation:
Translated from the Russian by Kathleen Cook
They are all serious, and all wear solemn faces; they discuss important subjects and air their theories; but meanwhile workers eat abominably and sleep in filth and stuffiness without pillows. There are as many as forty of them sleeping in one room and bugs everywhere, and the stench and damp and moral impurity. It's plain that all our clever talk is only meant to distract our attention and other people's.
Explanation:
Translated from the Russian by Kathleen Cook
— What is the noisy world to me? Oh, what are friends and foes?... How sweet it is to play a mandolin!
— That's a guitar, not a mandolin.
— To one mad with live it is a mandolin.
Explanation:
Translated from the Russian by Kathleen Cook
It is so obvious that to live in the present, we must first redeem the past, and have done with it; and it is only by suffering that we can redeem it, by strenuous, unremitting toil.
Explanation:
Translated from the Russian by Kathleen Cook
When I work for hours without getting tired, I am easy in my mind and I seem to know why I exist. But God alone knows what most of the people in Russia were born for.
Explanation:
Translated from the Russian by Kathleen Cook
If you run with the pack, bark or no, but wag your tail.
Explanation:
Translated from the Russian by Kathleen Cook
I quite appreciate my destiny; every day some misfortune happens to me, and I have long since grown accustomed to it, and face my fortune with a smile.
Explanation:
Translated from the Russian by Kathleen Cook
Yes, we are at least two hundred years behind the times. We have achieved nothing at all as yet; we have no attitude towards the past; we only philosophise, complain of boredom, or drink vodka.
Explanation:
Translated from the Russian by Kathleen Cook
And what does it mean, to die? Perhaps man has a hundred senses, and when he dies only the five senses that we know perish with him, and the other ninety-five remain alive.
Explanation:
Translated from the Russian by Kathleen Cook
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