“I was not born to amuse the Tsars.”

Mistress-like, its brilliance vain, highly capricious and inane.

With womankind, the less we love them, the easier they become to charm.

Thus people–so it seems to me– Become good friends from sheer ennui.

Moscow, how many strains are fusing in that one sound, for Russian hearts! What store of riches it imparts!

Better the illusions that exalt us than ten thousand truths.

Try to be forgotten. Go live in the country. Stay in mourning for two years, then remarry, but choose somebody decent.

If you but knew the flames that burn in me which I attempt to beat down with my reason.

Then came a moment of renaissance, I looked up – you again are there, A fleeting vision, the quintessence Of all that`s beautiful and rare.

Unrequited love is not an affront to man but raises him.

It is better to have dreamed a thousand dreams that never were than never to have dreamed at all.

Fearing no insult, asking for no crown, receive with indifference both flattery and slander, and do not argue with a fool.

Somewhere between obsession and compulsion is impulse.

Love passed, the Muse appeared, the weather of mind got clarity new-found; now free, I once more weave together emotion, thought, and magic sound.

I am married and happy. My only wish is that nothing will change.

Two fixed ideas can no more exist together in the moral world than two bodies can occupy one and the same place in the physical world.

A man who’s active and incisive can yet keep nail-care much in mind: why fight what’s known to be decisive? Custom is despot of mankind.

All the photographers were trying to just get me off, which was hilarious. But it was very, very amusing.