“No hay felicidad en la existencia, no hay más que relámpagos de felicidad.”

“So that's what it is!" he suddenly exclaimed aloud. "What joy!”

“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.”

“It was only at her prayers that she felt able to think calmly and clearly either of Prince Andrey or Anatole, with a sense that her feelings for them were as nothing compared with her feel of worship and awe of God.”

“I led the life of so many other so-called respectable people,—that is, in debauchery. And like the majority, while leading the life of a debauche, I was convinced that I was a man of irreproachable morality.”

“Ah, if everyone was as sensitive as you! There's no girl who hasn't gone through that. And it's all so unimportant!”

“The whole world is divided for me into two parts: one is she, and there is all happiness, hope, light; the other is where she is not, and there is dejection and darkness...”

“But despite the fact that the doctors treated him, bled him, and gave him medicines to drink -- he recovered.”

“They had supper and went away, and Ivan Ilyich was left alone with the consciousness that his life was poisoned and was poisoning the lives of others, and that this poison did not weaken but penetrated more and more deeply into his whole being.

“truth, like gold, is to be obtained not by its growth, but by washing away from it all that is not gold.”

“The two most powerful warriors are patience and time.

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

“He wanted and needed their love, but felt none towards them. He now had neither love nor humility nor purity”

“Higher and higher receded the sky, wider and wider spread the streak of dawn, whiter grew the pallid silver of the dew, more lifeless the sickle of the moon...”

“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.”