“Now that Vronsky had deceived her, she was prepared to love Levin and to hate Vronsky.”

“I felt that what I had been standing on had collapsed and that I had nothing left under my feet. What I had lived on no longer existed, and there was nothing left.

“Every reform by violence is to be deprecated, because it does little to correct the evil while men remain as they are, and because wisdom has no need of violence.”

“Anna Arkadyevna read and understood, but it was distasteful to her to read, that it, to follow the reflection of other people's lives. She had too great a desire to live herself.”

“Everything depends on upbringing. ”

“Then as now much time was spent arguing about the rights of women, husband-and-wife relationships and freedom and rights within marriage, but Natasha had no interest in any such questions. Questions like these, then as now, existed exclusively for people who see marriage only in terms of satisfaction given and received by the married couple, though this is only one principle of married life rather than its overall meaning, which lies in the family.”

“at one time, a freethinker was a man who had been brought up in the conceptions of religion, law and morality, who reached freethought only after conflict and difficulty. But now a new type of born freethinkers has appeared, who grow up without so much as hearing that there used to be laws of morality, or religion, that authorities existed... In the old days, you see, if a man - a Frenchman, for instance- wished to get an education, he would have set to work to study the classics, the theologians, the tragedians, historians and philosophers- and you can realize all the intellectual labour involved. But nowadays he goes straight for the literature of negation, rapidly assimilates the essence of the science of negation, and thinks he's finished.

“There will be today, there will be tomorrow, there will be always, and there was yesterday, and there was the day before...”

“In Varenka, she realized that one has but to forget oneself and love others, and one will be calm, happy, and noble.”

“If you look for perfection, you'll never be content.”

“He had the unlucky capacity many men have of seeing and believing in the possibility of goodness and truth, but of seeing the evil and falsehood of life too clearly to take any serious part 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.”

“he was one of those diplomats who like and know how to work, and, despite his laziness, he occasionally spent nights at his desk.”

“All that day she had had the feeling that she was playing in the theatre with actors better than herself and that her poor playing spoiled the whole thing.”

“It's like scarlet fever: one has to get it over." "Then one should invent a way of inoculating love, like vaccination.”