“Is it possible to love a woman who will never understand the profoundest interests of my life? Is it possible to love a woman simply for her beauty, to love the statue of a woman?”

“The difference between what he had been then and what he now was, was enormous...Then he was free and fearless...now he felt himself caught in the meshes of a stupid, empty, valueless, frivolous life...He remembered how proud he was at one time of his straightforwardness, how he had made a rule of always speaking the truth...and he was now sunk deep in lies...lies considered as truth by all who surrounded him.”

“A wife's a worry, a non-wife's even worse.”

“There are such repulsive faces in the world.”

“A little muzhik was working on the railroad, mumbling in his beard.

“He stepped down, avoiding any long look at her as one avoids long looks at the sun, but seeing her as one sees the sun, without looking.”

“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.”

“He was right in saying that the only certain happiness in life is to live for others.”

“It's wrong, what you say, and I beg you, if you're a good man, to forget what you've said, as I forget it," she said at last.

“To evoke in oneself a feeling one has once experienced, and having evoked it in oneself, then by means of movements, lines, colors, sounds, or forms expressed in words, so to transmit that feeling that others may experience the same feeling - this is the activity of art.”

“As though I had been going steadily downhill, imagining that I was going uphill. So it was in fact. In public opinion I was going uphill, and steadily as I got up it, life was ebbing away from me....And now the work's done, there's only death.”

“Everything that I Know, I Know Only Because I Love...”

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

“In infinite time, in infinite matter, in infinite space, is formed a bubble organism, and that bubble lasts a while and bursts, and that bubble is Me.”

“without knowing who I am and why I’m here it is impossible to live. Yet I cannot know that and therefore I cannot live”