“Olenin always took his own path and had an unconscious objection to the beaten tracks.”

“He soon felt that the realization of his longing gave him only one grain of the mountain of bliss he had anticipated. That realization showed him the eternal error men make by imagining that happiness consists in the gratification of their wishes.”

“And then all at once love turns up, and you're done for, done for.”

“I think that to find out what love is really like, one must first make a mistake and then put it right.”

“Patience is waiting. Not passively waiting. That is laziness. But to keep going when the going is hard and slow - that is patience. The two most powerful warriors are patience and time.”

“Those are the men,' added Bolkonsky with a sigh which he could not suppress, as they went out of the palace, 'those are the men who decide the fate of nations.”

“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.”

“All the diversity, all the charm, and all the beauty of life are made up of light and shade.”

“I ask one thing: I ask the right to hope and suffer as I do now."

“Our body is a machine for living. It is organized for that, it is its nature. Let life go on in it unhindered and let it defend itself.”

Why am I going?" he repeated, looking straight into her eyes. "You know that I am going in order to be where you are," said he. "I cannot do otherwise."

“But any acquisition that doesn't correspond to the labour expended is dishonest”

“He got up, wishing to go around, but the aunt handed him the snuffbox right over Helene, behind her back. Helene moved forward so as to make room and, smiling, glanced around. As always at soirees, she was wearing a gown in the fashion of the time, quite open in front and back. Her bust, which had always looked like marble to Pierre, was now such a short distance from him that he could involuntarily make out with his nearsighted eyes the living loveliness of her shoulders and neck, and so close to his lips that he had only to lean forward a little to touch her. He sensed the warmth of her body, the smell of her perfume, and the creaking of her corset as she breathed. He saw not her marble beauty, which made one with her gown, he saw and sensed all the loveliness of her body, which was merely covered by clothes. And once he had seen it, he could not see otherwise, as we cannot return to a once-exposed deception.”

“You need feeling, emotion, to create. You can't create out of indifference.”

“He looked at her as a man might look at a faded flower he had plucked, in which it was difficult for him to trace the beauty that had made him pick and so destroy it”