It's not those who are handsome we love, but those we love who are handsome.
It showed him the mistake men make in picturing to themselves happiness as the realization of their desires.
It seems as though mankind has forgotten the laws of its divine Saviour, Who preached love and forgiveness of injuries—and that men attribute the greatest merit to skill in killing one another.
It is said that one swallow does not make a summer, but can it be that because one swallow does not make a summer another swallow, sensing and anticipating summer, must not fly? If every blade of gras...
Indeed, a bird is made in such a way that it can fly, gather food and build a nest, and when I see a bird doing these things I rejoice. Goats, hares and wolves are made in order to eat, multiply and f...
In the depths of his heart Vasili Andreevich knew that it could not yet be near morning, but he was growing more and more afraid, and wished both to get to know and yet to deceive himself.
In spite of Stepan Arkadyevitch's efforts to be an attentive father and husband, he never could keep in his mind that he had a wife and children.
In captivity, in the shed, Pierre had learned, not with his mind, but with his whole being, his life, that man is created for happiness, that happiness is within him, in the satisfying of natural huma...
I'm getting old, that's the thing! What's in me now won't be there anymore.
I realized that I had been lost, and how I had become lost. I had strayed not so much because my ideas had been incorrect as because I had lived foolishly. I realized that I had been blinded from the...
I know now that people only seem to live when they care only for themselves, and that it is by love for others that they really live. He who has Love has God in him, and is in God - - because God is L...
I have nothing to make me miserable, she said, getting calmer; but can you understand that everything has become hateful, loathsome, coarse to me, and I myself most of all? You can't imagine what loat...
I don't want to prove anything; I merely want to live, to do no one harm but myself. I have the right to do that, haven't I?
I do not live my own life, there is something stronger than me which directs me. I suffer;but formerly I was dead and only now do I live.
I cannot think of those years without horror, loathing and heartache. I killed men in war and challenged men to duels in order to kill them. I lost at cards, consumed the labour of the peasants, sente...
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 t...
Here I am alive, and it's not my fault, so I have to try and get by as best I can without hurting anybody until death takes over.
He was much changed and grown even thinner since Pyotr Ivanovich had last seen him, but, as is always the case with the dead, his face was handsomer and above all more dignified than than when he was...
He was fond of angling, and seemed proud of being able to like such a stupid occupation.
He looked at her as a man looks at a faded flower he has gathered , with difficulty recognizing the beauty for which he picked and ruined it.