Just when the question of how to live had become clearer to him, a new insoluble problem presented itself – Death.
I’d rather end up wishing I hadn’t than end up wishing I had.
With friends, one is well; but at home, one is better.
Patience is waiting. Not passively waiting. That is laziness. But to keep going when the going is hard and slow – that is patience. The two most powerful warriors are patience and time.
The antagonism between life and conscience may be removed in two ways: by a change of life or by a change of conscience.
Many families remain for years in the same place, though both husband and wife are sick of it, simply because there is neither complete division nor agreement between them.
One must put oneself in every one’s position. To understand everything is to forgive everything.
To speak of it would be giving importance to something that has none.
He sought his former accustomed fear of death and did not find it. “Where is it? What death?” There was no fear because there was no death. In place of death there was light.
Just as a painter needs light in order to put the finishing touches to his picture, so I need an inner light, which I feel I never have enough of in the autumn.
I ask one thing only: I ask for the right to hope, to suffer as I do. But if even that cannot be, command me to disappear, and I disappear. You shall not see me if my presence is distasteful to you.
There was no solution, save that universal solution which life gives to all questions, even the most complex and insolvable: One must live in the needs of the day – that is, forget oneself.
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.
In Varenka, she realized that one has but to forget oneself and love others, and one will be calm, happy, and noble.
Every man had his personal habits, passions, and impulses toward goodness, beauty, and truth.
I do value my work awfully; but in reality only consider this: all this world of ours is nothing but a speck of mildew, which has grown up on a tiny planet. And for us to suppose we can have something great – ideas, work – it’s all dust and ashes.
I wanted to run after him, but remembered that it is ridiculous to run after one’s wife’s lover in one’s socks; and I did not wish to be ridiculous but terrible.
Those whom God wishes to destroy he drives mad.
Power is a word the meaning of which we do not understand.
We love people not so much for the good they’ve done us, as for the good we’ve done them.