“When she heard this Sonya blushed so that tears came into her eyes and, unable to bear the looks turned upon her, ran away into the dancing hall, whirled round it at full speed with her dress puffed out like a balloon, and, flushed and smiling, plumped down on the floor.”

“One of the first conditions of happiness is that the link between Man and Nature shall not be broken.”

“When loving with human love one may pass from love to hatred, but divine love cannot change.”

“Anna smiled,as people smile at the weaknesses of those they love. . .”

“We love people not so much for the good they've done us, as for the good we've done them.”

“It's not given to people to judge what's right or wrong. People have eternally been mistaken and will be mistaken, and in nothing more than in what they consider right and wrong.”

“I don't allow myself to doubt myself even for a moment.”

“Perhaps it's because I appreciate all I have so much that I don't worry about what I haven't got.”

“Wrong does not cease to be wrong because the majority share in it.”

“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.”

“To tell the truth is very difficult, and young people are rarely capable of it.”

“The main reason for the terrible cruelty between men today, apart from the absence religion, is still the refined complexity of life which shields people from the consequences of their actions. However cruel Attila, Genghis Khan and their followers may have been, the act of killing people personally, face to face, must have been unpleasant: the wailing relatives and the presence of the corpses. And thus their cruelty was restrained. Nowadays we kill people through such a complex process of communication, and the consequences of our cruelty are so carefully removed and concealed from us, that there is no restraint on the bestiality of the action.”

“Let fear once get possession of the soul, and it does not readily yield its place to another sentiment.”

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

“For the first time in his life he knew the bitterest sort of misfortune, misfortune beyond remedy, misfortune his own fault.”