It seems to me that what we call beauty in a face lies in the smile: if the smile heightens the charm of the face, the face is a beautiful one; if it does not alter it, the face is ordinary, and if 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, and bronzes,...
Man survives earthquakes, epidemics, the horrors of disease, and agonies of the soul, but all the time his most tormenting tragedy has been, is, and will always be, the tragedy of the bedroom.
All these institutions [prisons] seemed purposely invented for the production of depravity and vice, condensed to such a degree that no other conditions could produce it, and for the spreading of this...
In everything, almost in everything, I wrote I was guided by the need of collecting ideas which, linked together, would be the expression of myself, though each individual idea, expressed separately i...
Instead of the former divinely appointed aims of the Jewish, Greek, or Roman nations, which ancient historians regarded as representing the progress of humanity, modern history has postulated its own...
It would be a sin to help you destroy yourself.
He was afraid of defiling the love which filled his soul.
This history of culture will explain to us the motives, the conditions of life, and the thought of the writer or reformer.
Respect was invented to cover the empty place where love should be.
There was no answer, except the general answer life gives to all the most complex and insoluble questions. That answer is: one must live for the needs of the day, in other words, become oblivious.
The prison inspector and the warders, though they had never understood or gone into the meaning of these dogmas and of all that went on in church, believed that they must believe, because the higher a...
And not only the pride of intellect, but the stupidity of intellect. And, above all, the dishonesty, yes, the dishonesty of intellect. Yes, indeed, the dishonesty and trickery of intellect.
I will still get angry at Ivan the coachman, I will still argue, I will express my thoughts ineptly, there will be a wall between the holy of holies of my soul and other people, even my wife; I will s...
Truth, like gold, is to be obtained not by its growth, but by washing away from it all that is not gold.
Respect is an invention of people who want to cover up the empty place where love should be.
What is the matter with you? asked Shcherbatsky.Nothing much, but there is little to be happy about in this world.Little? You'd better come with me to Paris instead of going to some Mulhausen or other...
How strange it is that when I was a child I tried to be like a grownup, yet as soon as I ceased to be a child I often longed to be like one.
What's all this love of arguing? No one ever convinces anyone else.
Wait, wait,' he began, interrupting Oblonsky. 'Aristocratism, you say. But allow me to ask, what makes up this aristocratism of Vronsky or whoever else it may be - such aristocratism that I can be sco...