* * * * *

We fret ourselves to reform life, in order that posterity may be happy, and posterity will say as usual:  “In the past it used to be better, the present is worse than the past.”

* * * * *

My motto:  I don’t want anything.

* * * * *

When a decent working-man takes himself and his work critically, people call him grumbler, idler, bore; but when an idle scoundrel shouts that it is necessary to work, he is applauded.

* * * * *

When a woman destroys things like a man, people think it natural and everybody understands it; but when like a man, she wishes or tries to create, people think it unnatural and cannot reconcile themselves to it.

* * * * *

When I married, I became an old woman.

* * * * *

He looked down on the world from the height of his baseness.

* * * * *

“Your fiancee is very pretty.”  “To me all women are alike.”

* * * * *

He dreamt of winning three hundred thousand in lottery, twice in succession, because three hundred thousand would not be enough for him.

* * * * *

N., a retired Councillor of State, lives in the country; he is sixty-six.  He is educated, liberal-minded, reads, likes an argument.  He learns from his guests that the new coroner Z. walks about with a slipper on one foot and a boot on the other, and lives with another man’s wife.  N. thinks all the time of Z.; he does nothing but talk about him, how he walks about in one slipper and lives with another man’s wife; he talks of nothing else; at last he goes to sleep with his own wife (he has not slept with her for the last eight years), he is agitated and the whole time talks about Z. Finally he has a stroke, his arm and leg are paralyzed—­and all this from agitation about Z. The doctor comes.  With him too N. talks about Z. The doctor says that he knows Z., that Z. now wears two boots, his leg being well, and that he has married the lady.

* * * * *

I hope that in the next world I shall be able to look back at this life and say:  “Those were beautiful dreams....”

* * * * *

The squire N., looking at the undergraduate and the young girl, the children of his steward Z.:  “I am sure Z. steals from me, lives grandly on stolen money, the undergraduate and the girl know it or ought to know it; why then do they look so decent?”

* * * * *

She is fond of the word “compromise,” and often uses it; “I am incapable of compromise....”  “A board which has the shape of a parallelepiped.”

* * * * *