Love the animals: God has given them the rudiments of thought and joy untroubled.

At first it was simply liking, Nastenka, but now, now ! I am just in the same position as you were when you went to him with your bundle. In a worse position than you, Nastenka,because he cared for no one else as you do.

By interpreting freedom as the propagation and immediate gratification of needs, people distort their own nature, for they engender in themselves a multitude of pointless and foolish desires, habits, and incongruous stratagems. Their lives are motivated only by mutual envy, sensuality, and ostentation.

There are chance meetings with strangers that interest us from the first moment, before a word is spoken.

The world stands on absurdities, and without them perhaps nothing at all would happen.

Break what must be broken, once for all, that's all, and take the suffering on oneself.

For what is man without desires, without free will, and without the power of choice but a stop in an organ pipe?