Everybody wants to change the world, but nobody thinks about changing himself.

The more we live by our intellect, the less we understand the meaning of life.

All governments are in equal measure good and evil. The best ideal is anarchy.

No one is satisfied with his position, but every one is satisfied with his wit

God forgive me everything!' she said, feeling the impossibility of struggling.

Until you do what you believe in, you don't know whether you believe it or not.

To tell the truth is very difficult, and young people are rarely capable of it.

Whenever my life came to a halt, the questions would arise: Why? And what next?

If so many men, so many minds, certainly so many hearts, so many kinds of love.

Then we should find some artificial inoculation against love, as with smallpox.

It's all God's will: you can die in your sleep, and God can spare you in battle.

Three things are needed to educate the peasantry: schools, schools, and schools.

My principal sin is doubt. I doubt everything, and am in doubt most of the time.

Work is the inevitable condition of human life, the true source of human welfare.

There is trouble with a wife, but it's even worse with a woman who is not a wife.

If you love me as you say you do,' she whispered, 'make it so that I am at peace.

The only significance of life consists in helping to establish the kingdom of God.

The true office of any faith is to give life a meaning which death cannot destroy.

Patriotism is the principle that will justify the training of wholesale murderers.

One can live magnificently in this world if one knows how to work and how to love.

But that's just the aim of civilization - to make everything a source of enjoyment.

It's not so much that he can't fall in love, but he has not the weakness necessary.

An agile but unintelligent and abnormal German, possessed of the mania of grandeur.

Which is worse? the wolf who cries before eating the lamb or the wolf who does not.

By words one transmits thoughts to another, by means of art, one transmits feelings.

Wealth is a great sin in the eyes of God. Poverty is a great sin in the eyes of man.

Every man and every living creature has a sacred right to the gladness of springtime.

Ivan Ilych's life had been most simple and most ordinary and therefore most terrible.

Where is there any book of the law so clear to each man as that written in his heart?

But every acquisition that is disproportionate to the labor spent on it is dishonest.

The best method for a given teacher is the one which is most familiar to the teacher.

When ignorance does not know something, it says that what it does not know is stupid.

He was right in saying that the only certain happiness in life is to live for others.

Upon meeting, you're judged by your clothes, upon parting you're judged by your wits.

Art is not a handicraft, it is the transmission of feeling the artist has experienced.

All the variety, all the charm, all the beauty of life is made up of light and shadow.

People are always happy where there is love, because their happiness in in themselves.

We can know only that we know nothing. And that is the highest degree of human wisdom.

Art should cause violence to be set aside and it is only art that can accomplish this.

How often we sin, how much we deceive, and all for what?... All will end in death, all!

Men need only trust in Christ's teaching and obey it, and there will be peace on earth.

Between the murder of an animal and the murder of a man, there's no more than ONE step!

Giving alms is only a virtuous deed when you give money that you yourself worked to get.

I have learned what must be, and therefore have come to see the whole horror of what is.

Mathematics is the queen of disciplines.... it will drive the nonsense out of your head!

He liked to fish; he seemed to take pride in being able to like such a stupid occupation.

Human love serves to love those dear to us but to love one's enemies we need divine love.

A man's every action is inevitably conditioned by what surrounds him and by his own body.

I can't understand how anyone can write without rewriting everything over and over again.

I imagine, joking apart, that to know love, one must make mistakes and then correct them.

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