“In the midst of winter, I find within me the invisible summer...”

“Why nowadays there's a new fashion every day.”

“The march of humanity, springing as it does from an infinite multitude of individual wills, is continuous.”

“Levin was almost of the same age as Oblonsky; their intimacy did not rest merely on champagne. Levin had been the friend and companion of his early youth. They were fond of one another in spite of the difference of their characters and tastes, as friends are fond of one another who have been together in early youth. But in spite of this, each of them—as is often the way with men who have selected careers of different kinds—though in discussion he would even justify the other's career, in his heart despised it. It seemed to each of them that the life he led himself was the only real life, and the life led by his friend was a mere phantasm. Oblonsky could not restrain a slight mocking smile at the sight of Levin. How often he had seen him come up to Moscow from the country where he was doing something, but what precisely Stepan Arkadyevitch could never quite make out, and indeed he took no interest in the matter. Levin arrived in Moscow always excited and in a hurry, rather ill at ease and irritated by his own want of ease, and for the most part with a perfectly new, unexpected view of things. Stepan Arkadyevitch laughed at this, and liked it. In the same way Levin in his heart despised the town mode of life of his friend, and his official duties, which he laughed at, and regarded as trifling. But the difference was that Oblonsky, as he was doing the same as every one did, laughed complacently and good-humoredly, while Levin laughed without complacency and sometimes angrily.”

“Only people who are capable of loving strongly can also suffer great sorrow, but this same necessity of loving serves to counteract their grief and heals them.”

“The antagonism between life and conscience may be removed in two ways: by a change of life or by a change of conscience.”

“Every man and every living creature has a sacred right to the gladness of springtime.”

“I did not myself know what I wanted: I feared life, desired to escape from it, yet still hoped something of it.”

“Yes: if only a hundredth of the efforts spent in curing diseases were spent in curing debauchery, disease would long ago have ceased to exist, whereas now all efforts are employed, not in extirpating debauchery, but in favoring it, by assuring the harmlessness of the consequences.”

“I killed the wife when I first tasted sensual joys without love, and then it was that I killed my wife.”

“We shall all of us die, so why should I grudge a little trouble?”

“Life is fragile and absurd.

“What you spoke of just now was a mistake, not love”

“They had to return to the one sure and never-failing resource- slander.”