The most intolerable people are provincial celebrities.

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Owing to our flightiness, because the majority of us are unable and unaccustomed to think or to look deeply into life’s phenomena, nowhere else do people so often say:  “How banal!” nowhere else do people regard so superficially, and often contemptuously other people’s merits or serious questions.  On the other hand nowhere else does the authority of a name weigh so heavily as with us Russians, who have been abased by centuries of slavery and fear freedom....

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A doctor advised a merchant to eat soup and chicken.  The merchant thought the advice ironical.  At first he ate a dinner of botvinia and pork, and then, as if recollecting the doctor’s orders, ordered soup and chicken and swallowed them down too, thinking it a great joke.

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Father Epaminond catches fish and puts them in his pocket; then, when he gets home, he takes out a fish at a time, as he wants it, and fries it.

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The nobleman X. sold his estate to N. with all the furniture according to an inventory, but he took away everything else, even the oven dampers, and after that N. hated all noblemen.

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The rich, intellectual X., of peasant origin, implored his son:—­“Mike, don’t get out of your class.  Be a peasant until you die, do not become a nobleman, nor a merchant, nor a bourgeois.  If, as you say, the Zemstvo officer now has the right to inflict corporal punishment on peasants, then let him also have the right to punish you.”  He was proud of his peasant origin, he was even haughty about it.

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They celebrated the birthday of an honest man.  Took the opportunity to show off and praise one another.  Only towards the end of the dinner they suddenly discovered that the man had not been invited; they had forgotten.

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A gentle quiet woman, getting into a temper, says:  “If I were a man, I would just bash your filthy mug.”

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A Mussulman for the salvation of his soul digs a well.  It would be a pleasant thing if each of us left a school, a well, or something like that, so that life should not pass away into eternity without leaving a trace behind it.

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We are tired out by servility and hypocrisy.

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N. once had his clothes torn by dogs, and now, when he pays a call anywhere, he asks:  “Aren’t there any dogs here?”

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A young pimp, in order to keep up his powers, always eats garlic.

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