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

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

… for nightinggales - we know - can’t live on fairytales.

There are always so many conjectures as to the issue of any event that, whatever the outcome, there will always be people to say: 'I said then that it would be so'

A man can spend several hours sitting cross-legged in the same position if he knows that noting prevents him from changing it; but if he knows that he has to sit with his legs crossed like that, he will get cramps, his legs will twitch and strain towards where he would like to stretch them.

As long as there are slaughterhouses there will be battlefields. A vegetarian diet is the acid test of humanitarianism.

He felt that he was himself and did not wish to be anyone else. He only wished now to be better than he had been formerly