“Here I am alive, and it's not my fault, so I have to try and get by as best I can without hurting anybody until death takes over.”

“He felt himself, and did not want to be anyone else. All he wanted now was to be better than before.”

“This child, with his naive outlook on life was the compass which showed them the degree of their departure from what they knew but did not want to know.”

“But I'm married, and believe me, in getting to know thoroughly one's wife, if one loves her, as some one has said, one gets to know all women better than if one knew thousands of them.”

“He looked at her as a man looks at a faded flower he has gathered, with difficulty recognizing in it the beauty for which he picked and ruined it. And in spite of this he felt that then, when his love was stronger, he could, if he had greatly wished it, have torn that love out of his heart; but now when as at that moment it seemed to him he felt no love for her, he knew that what bound him to her could not be broken.”

“Happiness does not depend on outward things, but on the way we see them.”

“Death is finished, he said to himself. It is no more!”

“What is reason given me for, if I am not to use it to avoid bringing unhappy beings into the world!”

“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.”

“...the more he did nothing, the less time he had to do anything.”

“Prince Andrei was one of the best dancers of his day. Natasha danced exquisitely. Her little feet in their satin dancing shoes performed their role swiftly, lightly, as if they had wings, while her face was radiant and ecstatic with happiness.”

“He had learned that, as there is no situation in the world in which a man can be happy and perfectly free, so there is no situation in which he can be perfectly unhappy and unfree.”

“When one's head is gone one doesn't weep over one's hair!”

“What a strange illusion it is to suppose that beauty is goodness.

“Energy rests upon love; and come as it will, there's no forcing it.”