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...

We are all brothers, and yet I live by receiving a salary for arraigning, judging and punishing a thief or a prostitute, whose existence is conditioned by the whole consumption of my life.

[…] but just as formerly these pursuits and ideas had seemed petty and insignificant in comparison with the darkness that overshadowed all existence, so now they seemed as petty and insignificant in comparison with the...

Was it by reason that I attained to the knowledge that I must love my neighbor and not to throttle him?. They told me so when I was a child, and I gladly believed it,...

He saw either death or the approach of it everywhere. But his undertaking now occupied him all the more. He had to live his life to the end, until death came. Darkness covered everything for...

I … having filled my life with the spiritual blessings Christianity gave me, brimful of these blessings and living by them, I, like a child, not understanding them, destroy them — that is, I wish...

I understood, not with my intellect but with my whole being, that no theories of the rationality of existence or of progress could justify such an act; I realized that even if all the people...

The Lord had given them the day and the Lord had given them the strength. And the day and the strength had been dedicated to labor, and the labor was its reward. Who was the...

I think… if it is true that there are as many minds as there are heads, then there are as many kinds of love as there are hearts.

Wrong does not cease to be wrong because the majority share in it.

In actuality, it was like the homes of all people who are not really rich but who want to look rich, and therefore end up looking like one another: it had damasks, ebony, plants, carpets,...

It was necessary that millions of men in whose hands lay the real power — the soldiers who fired, or transported provisions and guns — should consent to carry out the will of these weak...

Natasha, with a vigorous turn from her heel on to her toe, walked over to the middle of the room and stood still… Natasha took the first note, her throat swelled, her bosom heaved, a...

He was nine years old; he was a child; he he knew his own soul, it was precious to him, he guarded it as the eyelid guards the eye, and without the key of love...

Din orice situatie exista o iesire

Is it really possible to tell someone else what one feels?