Instead of going to Paris to attend lectures, go to the public library, and you won't come out for twenty years, if you really wish to learn.

All the stories and descriptions of that time without exception peak only of the patriotism, self-sacrifice, despair, grief, and heroism of the Russians. But in reality it was not like that...The majority of the people paid no attention to the general course of events but were influenced only by their immediate personal interests.

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

There are people who, on meeting a successful rival, no matter in what, are at once disposed to turn their backs on everything good in him, and to see only what is bad. There are people, on the other hand, who desire above all to find in that lucky rival the qualities by which he has outstripped them, and seek with a throbbing ache at heart only what is good.

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

The ideas of the wise have been tested by centuries. Everything medium is lost and only original, deep and useful things are left.

In all history there is no war which was not hatched by the governments, the governments alone, independent of the interests of the people, to whom war is always pernicious even when successful.