“Happy families are all alike; every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way.”
“If you look for perfection, you'll never be content.”
“I’ve always loved you, and when you love someone, you love the whole person, just as he or she is, and not as you would like them to be.”
“Every heart has its own skeletons.”
“It’s hard to love a woman and do anything.”
He stepped down, trying not to look long at her, as if she were the sun, yet he saw her, like the sun, even without looking.
“She hardly knew at times what it was she feared, and what she hoped for. Whether she feared or desired what had happened or what was going to happen and exactly what she longed for, she could not have said.”
Respect was invented to cover the empty place where love should be.
“It’s much better to do good in a way that no one knows anything about it.”
But the law of loving others could not be discovered by reason, because it is unreasonable.
“No, no, reconciliation is impossible. Even if we remain in the same house, we are strangers – strangers forever!” She repeated again with special significance the word so dreadful to her. “And how I loved him! my God, how I loved him!.... How I loved him! And now don’t I love him? Don’t I love him more than before? The most horrible thing is,” she began, but did not finish her thought, because Matrona Philimonovna put her head in at the door.”
″‘You’ve said nothing, of course, and I ask nothing,’ he was saying; ‘but you know that friendship’s not what I want: that there’s only one happiness in life for me, that word that you dislike so ... yes, love!...‘”
“Love those that hate you, but to love those one hates is impossible.”
“Ferreting in one’s soul, one often ferrets out something that might have lain there unnoticed.”
“Be bad, but at least don't be a liar, a deceiver!”
“Spring is the time of plans and projects.”
“Love. Why I don’t like the word is that it means too much to me, far more than you can understand,” and she glanced into his face. ‘Au revoir!‘”
“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.”
“Rummaging in our souls, we often dig up something that ought to have lain there unnoticed.”
“His ideas of marriage were, consequently, quite unlike those of the great majority of his acquaintances, for whom getting married was one of the numerous facts of social life. For Levin it was the chief affair of life, on which its whole happiness turned.”
“All the girls in the world were divided into two classes: one class--all the girls in the world except her, and those girls with all sorts of human weaknesses, and very ordinary girls: the other class--she alone, having no weaknesses of any sort and higher than all humanity.”
He was afraid of defiling the love which filled his soul.
“All the variety, all the charm, all the beauty of life is made up of light and shadow.”
″‘If you love me, as you say,’ she whispered, ‘do so that I may be at peace.‘”
“Anything’s better than lying and deceit.”
Whatever our fate is or may be, we have made it and do not complain of it."
“They haven’t an idea of what happiness is; they don’t know that without our love, for us there is neither happiness nor unhappiness--no life at all.”
What a strange illusion it is to suppose that beauty is goodness.
Everything intelligent is so boring.
And you know, there's less charm in life when you think about death--but it's more peaceful.
“Sometimes she did not know what she feared, what she desired: whether she feared or desired what had been or what would be, and precisely what she desired, she did not know.”
“I often think that men don't understand what is noble and what is ignorant, though they always talk about it.”
“Not one word, not one gesture of yours shall I, could I, ever forget...”
“Something magical has happened to me: like a dream when one feels frightened and creepy, and suddenly wakes up to the knowledge that no such terrors exist. I have wakened up.”
“Doctoring her seemed to her as absurd as putting together the pieces of a broken vase. Her heart was broken. Why would they try to cure her with pills and powders?”
“He could not be mistaken. There were no other eyes like those in the world. There was only one creature in the world who could concentrate for him all the brightness and meaning of life. It was she. It was Kitty.”
“The Kingdom of God is Within You,”
“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.”
“Anna spoke not only naturally and intelligently, but intelligently and casually, without attaching any value to her own thoughts, yet giving great value to the thoughts of the one she was talking to.”
“To educate the peasantry, three things are needed: schools, schools and schools.”
“And those who only know the non-platonic love have no need to talk of tragedy. In such love there can be no sort of tragedy.”
“Friends we shall never be, you know that yourself. Whether we shall be the happiest or the wretchedest of people--that's in your hands.”
“In infinite time, in infinite matter, in infinite space, is formed a bubble organism, and that bubble lasts a while and bursts, and that bubble is Me.”
“The pleasure lies not in discovering truth, but in searching for it.”
“I ask one thing: I ask the right to hope and suffer as I do now."
Vronsky”
Enough or not...it will have to do.
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.
Teach French and unteach sincerity.
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.
I don't allow myself to doubt myself even for a moment.
The only happy marriages I know are arranged ones.