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...
Writing laws is easy, but governing is difficult.
There can be only one permanent revolution- a moral one: the regeneration of the inner man.
Happiness does not depend on outward things, but on the way we see them.
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.
True science investigates and brings to human perception such truths and such knowledge as the people of a given time and society consider most important. Art transmits these truths from the region of perception to the region of emotion.
In order to understand, observe, deduce, man must first be conscious of himself as alive.
Drama, instead of telling us the whole of a man’s life, must place him in such a situation, tie such a knot, that when it is untied, the whole man is visible.
Ivan Ilych’s life had been most simple and most ordinary and therefore most terrible.
If we admit that human life can be ruled by reason, then all possibility of life is destroyed.
I felt a wish never to leave that room – a wish that dawn might never come, that my present frame of mind might never change.
Joy can only be real if people look upon their life as a service and have a definite object in life outside themselves and their personal happiness.
But our idea is that the wolves should be fed and the sheep kept safe.
People jump back and forth in pursuit of pleasures only because they see the emptiness of their lives more clearly than they do the emptiness of whichever new entertainment attracts them.
Every heart has its own skeletons.
He liked fishing and seemed to take pride in being able to like such a stupid occupation.
To say that you can love one person all your life is just like saying that one candle will continue burning as long as you live.
For man to be able to live he must either not see the infinite, or have such an explanation of the meaning of life as will connect the finite with the infinite.
They’ve got no idea what happiness is, they don’t know that without this love there is no happiness or unhappiness for us – there is no life.
Happiness consists of living each day as if it were the first day of your honeymoon and the last day of your vacation.