“He walked down, for a long while avoiding looking at her as at the sun, but seeing her, as one does the sun, without looking.”

“I ask one thing: I ask the right to hope and suffer as I do now."

“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.”

“They say: sufferings are misfortunes," said Pierre. 'But if at once this minute, I was asked, would I remain what I was before I was taken prisoner, or go through it all again, I should say, for God's sake let me rather be a prisoner and eat horseflesh again. We imagine that as soon as we are torn out of our habitual path all is over, but it is only the beginning of something new and good. As long as there is life, there is happiness. There is a great deal, a great deal before us.”

“Moreover, during his wife's confinement, something had happened that seemed extraordinary to him. He, an unbeliever, had fallen into praying, and at the moment he prayed, he believed. But that moment had passed, and he could not make his state of mind at that moment fit into the rest of his life.”

“You need feeling, emotion, to create. You can't create out of indifference.”

“That one must either explain life to oneself so that it does not seem to be an evil mockery by some sort of devil, or one must shoot oneself.”

“He knew she was there by the rapture and the terror that seized on his heart. She was standing talking to a lady at the opposite end of the ground. There was apparently nothing striking either in her dress or her attitude. But for Levin she was as easy to find in that crowdas a rose among nettles. Everything was made bright by her. She was the smile that shed light all around her.”

“He disliked contradiction, and still more, arguments that were continually skipping from one thing to another, introducing new and disconnected points, so that there was no knowing to which to reply.

“The most important acts, both for the one who accomplishes them and for his fellow creatures, are those that have remote consequences.”

“Everything seemed pleasant and easy to Nikolai during the first part of his stay in Voronezh and, as generally happens when a man is in a pleasant state of mind, everything went well and easily.”

“Occasionally she glanced at him, asking with her glance, 'Is this what I think?' "I understand,' she said, blushing. "What is this word?' he said, pointing to the "n' that signified the word "never." .... She wrote: t, I, c,g,n,o,a.”

“But the law of loving others could not be discovered by reason, because it is unreasonable.”

“No matter when, at whatever moment, if she were asked what she was thinking about she could reply quite correctly - one thing, her happiness and her unhappiness.”

“We expect rewards for goodness, and punishments for the bad things which we do. Often, they are not immediately”