“When the opponent expand, I contract. When he contracts, I expand. And, when there is an opportunity, I do not hit - it hits all by itself.”

“the starting point of all achievement is desire”

“It was a great day of victory for me when I finally realized that God only wanted me to be me, that He had created me with His own hand in my mother’s womb, that I was not a mistake, and that I could stand before Him as an individual without needing to compare myself with others.

“I alone cannot change the world, but I can cast a stone across the waters to create many ripples.”

“Know your own mind and you will be as wise as the sages.”

“Ma il silenzio amoroso tra una madre e un figlio non è una dimensione solitaria.”

“I have the consolation of having added nothing to my private fortune during my public service, and of retiring with hands clean as they are empty.”

“Everything I know, I know because I love.”

“I urge new converts to take plenty of time in Bible study and prayer before getting on a public platform to testify.”

“[Our] problems boil down to one of moral choices. God wanted a world based on moral values, thus He created mankind with the ability to respond to moral choices. Faced with the moral option of living selfishly or unselfishly, people can and do make wrong decisions. We are free to choose, but we reap the consequences of bad moral decisions.”

“Without books, I would certainly die.”

“No one is born hating another person because of the color of his skin or his background or his religion. People must learn to hate, and if they can learn to hate, they can be taught to love, for love comes more naturally to the human heart than its opposite”

“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.”

“Do what you have to do until you can do what you want to do.”

“Don't get set into one form, adapt it and build your own, and let it grow, be like water. Empty your mind, be formless, shapeless — like water. Now you put water in a cup, it becomes the cup; You put water into a bottle it becomes the bottle; You put it in a teapot it becomes the teapot. Now water can flow or it can crash. Be water, my friend.”