“Money isn’t the most important thing in life, but it’s reasonably close to oxygen on the ‘gotta have it’ scale.”

“Piter: Ah-ah, Baron! Is it not regrettable you were unable to devise this delicious scheme by yourself? Baron: Someday I will have you strangled, Piter. Piter: Of a certainty, Baron. Enfin! But a kind act is never lost, eh? Baron: Have you been chewing verite or semuta, Piter?”

“Speak not evil of the absent, for it is unjust.”

“If we commit ourselves to reading thus increasing our knowledge, only God limits how far we can go in this world.”

“The doors of the world are opened to people who can read.”

“Your life success is well designed by the mental transformation you experience. That mental transformation guides you to construct powerful decisions. You can't live life so well without mental make-ups.”

“Leadership and learning are indispensable to each other.

“Truth has drawn me into the field of politics; and I can say without the slightest hesitation, and yet in all humility, that those who say that religion has nothing to do with politics do not know what religion means.”

“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.”

“There are innumerable definitions of God, because His manifestations are innumerable.”

“For if we allow that human life is always guided by reason, we destroy the premise that life is possible at all.

“God can make your enemies your footstool.”

“Still there are moments when one feels free from one’s own identification with human limitations and inadequacies. At such moments, one imagines that one stands on some spot of a small planet, gazing in amazement at the cold yet profoundly moving beauty of the eternal, the unfathomable: life and death flow into one, and there is neither evolution nor destiny; only being.”

“We have exchanged love of family and home for cyberfriends and living in constant motion that robs the soul from memories—and perhaps from that still, small voice that longs to be heard.”

“Before you change your thinking, you have to change what goes into your mind