A big dolt, Z., a qualified nurse, of the Petersburg Rozhdestvensky School, having ideals, fell in love with X., a teacher, and believed him to be ideal, a public spirited worker after the manner of novels and stories of which she was so fond.  Little by little she found him out, a drunkard, an idler, good-natured and not very clever.  Dismissed, he began to live on his wife, sponged on her.  He was an excrescence, a kind of sarcoma, who wasted her completely.  She was once engaged to attend some intellectual country people, she went to them every day; they felt it awkward to give her money—­and, to her great vexation, gave her husband a suit as a present.  He would drink tea for hours and this infuriated her.  Living with her husband she grew thin, ugly, spiteful, stamped her foot and shouted at him:  “Leave me, you low fellow.”  She hated him.  She worked, and people paid the money to him, for, being a Zemstvo worker, she took no money, and it enraged her that their friends did not understand him and thought him ideal.

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A young man made a million marks, lay down on them, and shot himself.

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“That woman.” ...  “I married when I was twenty; I have not drunk a glass of vodka all my life, haven’t smoked a single cigarette.”  After he had run off with another woman, people got to like him more and to believe him more, and, when he walked in the street, he began to notice that they had all become kinder and nicer to him—­because he had fallen.

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A man and woman marry because both of them don’t know what to do with themselves.

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The power and salvation of a people lie in its intellegentsia, in the intellectuals who think honestly, feel, and can work.

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A man without a mustache is like a woman with a mustache.

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A man who cannot win a woman by a kiss will not win her by a blow.

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For one sensible person there are a thousand fools, and for one sensible word there are a thousand stupid ones; the thousand overwhelms the one, and that is why cities and villages progress so slowly.  The majority, the mass, always remain stupid; it will always overwhelm; the sensible man should give up hope of educating and lifting it up to himself; he had better call in the assistance of material force, build railways, telegraphs, telephones—­in that way he will conquer and help life forward.

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Really decent people are only to be found amongst men who have definite, either conservative or radical, convictions; so-called moderate men are much inclined to rewards, commissions, orders, promotions.

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