“Rummaging in our souls, we often dig up something that ought to have lain there unnoticed. ”

“In Varenka, she realized that one has but to forget oneself and love others, and one will be calm, happy, and noble.”

“All is over...I have nothing but you, remember that.”

“Ivan Ilych's life had been most simple and most ordinary and therefore most terrible.”

“We should show life neither as it is or as it ought to be, but only as we see it in our dreams.”

“Involuntarily it appeared to me that there, somewhere, was someone who amused himself by watching how I lived for thirty or forty years: learning, developing, maturing in body and mind, and how, having with matured mental powers reached the summit of life from which it all lay before me, I stood on that summit -- like an arch-fool -- seeing clearly that there is nothing in life, and that there has been and will be nothing. And he was amused... But whether that "someone" laughing at me existed or not, I was none the better off. I could give no reasonable meaning to any single action or to my whole life. I was only surprised that I could have avoided understanding this from the very beginning -- it has been so long known to all. Today or tomorrow sickness and death will come (they had come already) to those I love or to me; nothing will remain but stench and worms. Sooner or later my affairs, whatever they may be, will be forgotten, and I shall not exist. Then why go on making any effort?... How can man fail to see this? And how go on living? That is what is surprising! One can only live while one is intoxicated with life; as soon as one is sober it is impossible not to see that it is all a mere fraud and a stupid fraud! That is precisely what it is: there is nothing either amusing or witty about it, it is simply cruel and stupid.”

“But live while you live, tomorrow you die...”

“The only real science is the knowledge of how a person should live his life. And this knowledge is open to everyone.”

“Power is the sum total of the wills of the mass, transfered by express or tactic agreement to rulers chosen by the masses.”

“There was no solution but that usual solution which life gives to all questions, even the most complex and insoluble. That answer one must live in the needs of one that - that is, forget oneself.”

“She had no need to ask why he had come. She knew as certainly as if he had told her that he was here to be where she was.”

“what time can be more beautiful than the one in which the finest virtues, innocent cheerfulness and indefinable longing for love constitute the sole motives of your life?”

“We exchanged disagreeable remarks. The impression of this first quarrel was terrible. I say quarrel, but the term is inexact. It was the sudden discovery of the abyss that had been dug between us.”

“Man must not check reason by tradition, but contrariwise, must check tradition by reason.”

“Anna had been preparing herself for this meeting, had thought what she would say to him, but she did not succeed in saying anything of it; his passion mastered her. She tried to calm him, to calm herself, but it was too late. His feeling infected her. Her lips trembled so that for a long while she could say nothing." "Yes, you have conquered me, and I am yours," she said at last, pressing his hands to her bosom. "So it had to be," he said. "So long as we live, it must be so. I know it now.”