“When you understand that you will die to-morrow, if not to-day, and nothing will be left, then everything is so unimportant!... So one goes on living, amusing oneself with hunting, with work - anything so as not think of death”

“God forgive me everything!’ she said, feeling the impossibility of struggling...”

“The more is given the less the people will work for themselves, and the less they work the more their poverty will increase.”

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

“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...”

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

“The most mentally deranged people are those who see in others indications of insanity they do not notice in themselves.”

“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.”

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

“[Pierre] involuntarily started comparing these two men, so different and at the same time so similar, because of the love he had for both of them, and because both had lived and both had died.”

“We do not love people so much for the good they have done us, as for the good we do them”

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

“Love those you hate you.”

*"Splendid if I overcome My earthy passion, But if I succeed not, Still I have known happiness!”

“War is the most painful act of subjection to the laws of God that can be required of the human will.”