Never, never marry, my friend. Here’s my advice to you: don’t marry until you can tell yourself that you’ve done all you could, and until you’ve stopped loving the woman you’ve chosen, until you see...

If you look for perfection, you’ll never be content.

God knows of love

He felt now that he was not simply close to her, but that he did not know where he ended and she began.

If only [people] understood that every thought is both false and true! False by one-sidenedness resulting from man’s inability to embrace the whole truth, and true as an expression of one fact of human endeavor.

Without the support from religion–remember, we talked about it–no father, using only his own resources, would be able to bring up a child.

You need feeling, emotion, to create. You can’t create out of indifference.

And so there was no single cause for war, but it happened simply because it had to happen

Spiritual activity, education, civilization, culture, the idea are all vague, indefinite concepts, under the banner of which it is quite convenient to use words that have a still less clear meaning and therefore can easily...

He was not thinking that the Christian law which he had wanted to follow all his life prescribed that he forgive and love his enemies; but the joyful feeling of love and forgiveness of his...

Ah, if everyone was as sensitive as you! There’s no girl who hasn’t gone through that. And it’s all so unimportant!

The strongest of all warriors are these two — Time and Patience.

A man could not be prevented from making himself a big wax doll, and kissing it. But if the man were to come with the doll and sit before a man in love, and begin...

Just when the question of how to live had become clearer to him, a new insoluble problem presented itself – Death.

A quiet secluded life in the country, with the possibility of being useful to people to whom it is easy to do good, and who are not accustomed to have it done to them; then...

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

The two girls used to meet several times a day, and every time they met, Kitty’s eyes said: “Who are you? What are you? Are you really the exquisite creature I imagine you to be?...

The old oak, utterly transformed, draped in a tent of sappy dark green, basked faintly, undulating in the rays of the evening sun. Of the knotted fingers, the gnarled excrecenses, the aged grief and mistrust-...

There are such repulsive faces in the world.

But every acquisition that is disproportionate to the labor spent on it is dishonest.

Just think! This whole world of ours is only a speck of mildew sprung up on a tiny planet, yet we think we can have something great – thoughts,, actions! They are all but grains...

It would be a sin to help you destroy yourself.

And the candle by the light of which she had been reading that book filled with anxieties, deceptions, grief and evil, flared up brighter than ever, lit up for her all that had once been...

How strange it was to think that he, who such a short time ago dared not believe in the happiness of her loving him, now felt unhappy because she loved him too much!

He disliked contradiction, and still more, arguments that were continually skipping from one thing to another, introducing new and disconnected points, so that there was no knowing to which to reply.

A battle is won by him who is firmly resolved to win it.

God forgive me everything!’ she said, feeling the impossibility of struggling…

Millions of men, renouncing their human feelings and reason, had to go from west to east to slay their fellows, just as some centuries previously hordes of men had come from the east to the...

After dinner Natasha went to the clavichord, at Prince Andrey’s request, and began singing. Prince Andrey stood at the window, talking to the ladies, and listened to her. In the middle of a phrase, Prince...

A writer is dear and necessary for us only in the measure of which he reveals to us the inner workings of his very soul.

To što mi radimo da bismo si tobože zajamčili život, radi i noj kad gurne glavu u pijesak da ne vidi kako će ga ubiti. Samo što smo mi gori od noja, jer zbog neizvjesnog...

Anything is better than lies and deceit!

has no meaning, or it has a very wrong meaning. How

It’s too easy to criticize a man when he’s out of favour, and to make him shoulder the blame for everybody else’s mistakes.

I consider jealousy a humiliating and degrading feeling, and I shall never allow myself to be influenced by it.

The whole world is divided for me into two parts: one is she, and there is all happiness, hope, light; the other is where she is not, and there is dejection and darkness…

No one can attain to truth by himself. Only by laying stone on stone with the cooperation of all, by the millions of generations from our forefather Adam to our own times, is that temple...

If goodness has causes, it is not goodness; if it has effects, a reward, it is not goodness either. So goodness is outside the chain of cause and effect.

A finalidade ds humanos não consiste e cumprir o que eles consideram bem mas em chamar ‘meu’ ao maior número possível de objectos.

All the horrors of the reign of terror were based on concern for public tranquility.

Pure and complete sorrow is as impossible as pure and complete joy.

The most mentally deranged people are those who see in others indications of insanity they do not notice in themselves.

And what is justice? The princess thought of that proud word ‘justice’. All the complex laws of man centered for her in one clear and simple law—the law of love and self-sacrifice taught us by...

everything comes in time to him who knows how to wait . . . there is nothing stronger than these two: patience and time, they will do it all.

The main qualities that had earned him this universal respect in the service were, first, an extreme indulgence towards people, based on his awareness of his own shortcomings; second, a perfect liberalism, not the sort...

As often happens between people who have chosen different ways, each of them, while rationally justifying the other’s activity, despised it in his heart. To each of them it seemed that the life he led...

Pierre was right when he said that one must believe in the possibility of happiness in order to be happy, and I now believe in it. Let the dead bury the dead, but while I’m...

Then he thought himself unhappy, but happiness was all in the future; now he felt that the best happiness was already in the past.

There lay between them, separating them, that same terrible line of the unknown and of fear, like the line separating the living from the dead.

Her eyes, always sad, now looked into the mirror with particular hopelessness. “She’s flattering me,” thought the princess, and she turned away and went on reading. Julie, however, was not flattering her friend: indeed, the...