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.

Love is God, and to die means that I, a particle of love, shall return to the general and eternal source.

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

One of the most obtuse superstitions is the superstition of the scientists who say that man can exist without faith.

Religion reveals the meaning of life, and science only applies this meaning to the course of circumstances.

Each man lives for himself, uses his freedom to achieve his personal goals, and feels with his whole being that right now he can or cannot do such-and-such an action; but as soon as he does it, this action, committed at a certain moment in time, becomes irreversible, and makes itself the property of history, in which is has not a free but a predestined significance.

Government is an association of men who do violence to the rest of us.