“Happiness consists in always aspiring perfection, the pause in any level in perfection is the pause of happiness”

“I wrote everything into Anna Karenina, and nothing was left over.”

“You're not racing?" joked the officer. "Mine is a harder race," Alexei Alexandrovich replied respectfully. And though the reply did not mean anything, the officer pretended that he had heard a clever phrase from a clever man and had perfectly understood.”

“The best solution is to be kind and good while ignoring the opinions of others.”

“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.”

“I feel not only that I cannot disappear, as nothing disappears in the world, but that I will always be and have always been. I feel that, besides me, above me, spirits live, and that in this world there is truth.

“A man on a thousand mile walk has to forget his goal and say to himself every morning, 'Today I'm going to cover twenty-five miles and then rest up and sleep.”

“Power is the sum total of the wills of the mass, transfered by express or tactic agreement to rulers chosen by the masses.”

“Rummaging in our souls, we often dig up something that ought to have lain there unnoticed. ”

“It was all so strange, so unlike what he had been looking forward to.”

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

“[...most men do not try] to recognize the truth, but to persuade themselves that the life they are leading, which is what they like and are used to, is a life perfectly consistent with truth.”

“I wanted to run after him, but remembered that it is ridiculous to run after one's wife's lover in one's socks; and I did not wish to be ridiculous but terrible.”

“I am not strange but I feel queer. I am like that sometimes. I feel like crying all the time. It is very silly but it will pass.

“To get rid of an enemy one must love him. ”