“By digging into our souls, we often dig up what might better have remained there unnoticed."

“I shall go on in the same way, losing my temper with Ivan the coachman, falling into angry discussions, expressing my opinions tactlessly; there will be still the same wall between the holy of holies of my soul and other people, even my wife; I shall still go on scolding her for my own terror, and being remorseful for it; I shall still be as unable to understand with my reason why I pray, and I shall still go on praying; but my life now, my whole life apart from anything that can happen to me, every minute of it is no more meaningless, as it was before, but it has the positive meaning of goodness, which I have the power to put into it." - Levin”

“Love them that hate you, but you can't love those you hate.”

“Speech is silver but silence is golden.”

“Without the support from religion--remember, we talked about it--no father, using only his own resources, would be able to bring up a child.”

“Pierre was right when he said that one must believe in the possibility of happiness in order to be happy, and I now believe in it. Let the dead bury the dead, but while I'm alive, I must live and be happy.”

“Though the doctors treated him, let his blood, and gave him medications to drink, he nevertheless recovered.”

“Death, the inevitable end of everything, confronted him for the first time with irresistible force.

“All the variety, all the charm, all the beauty of life is made up of light and shadow.”

Pure, perfect sorrow is as impossible as pure and perfect joy.”

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

“Then we should find some artificial inoculation against love, as with smallpox. ”

“Kind people help each other even without noticing that they are doing so, and evil people act against each other on purpose. —CHINESE PROVERB”

“Everyone thinks of changing the world, but no one thinks of changing himself.”

“Though men in their hundreds of thousands had tried their hardest to disfigure that little corner of the earth where they had crowded themselves together, paving the ground with stones so that nothing could grow, weeding out every blade of vegetation, filling the air with the fumes of coal and gas, cutting down trees and driving away every beast and every bird -- spring, however, was still spring, even in the town. The sun shone warm, the grass, wherever it had not been scraped away, revived and showed green not only on the narrow strips of lawn on the boulevards but between the paving-stones as well, and the birches, the poplars and the wild cherry-trees were unfolding their sticky, fragrant leaves, and the swelling buds were bursting on the lime trees; the jackdaws, the sparrows and the pigeons were cheerfully getting their nests ready for the spring, and the flies, warmed by the sunshine, buzzed gaily along the walls. All were happy -- plants, birds, insects and children. But grown-up people -- adult men and women -- never left off cheating and tormenting themselves and one another. It was not this spring morning which they considered sacred and important, not the beauty of God's world, given to all creatures to enjoy -- a beauty which inclines the heart to peace, to harmony and to love. No, what they considered sacred and important were their own devices for wielding power over each other.”