When a man sees a dying animal, horror comes over him: that which he himself is, his essence, is obviously being annihilated before his eyes--is ceasing to be. But when the dying one is a person, and a beloved person, then, besides a sense of horror at the annihilation of life, there is a feeling of severance and a spiritual wound which, like a physical wound, sometimes kills and sometimes heals, but always hurts and fears any external, irritating touch.

He looked at her as a man looks at a faded flower he has gathered , with difficulty recognizing the beauty for which he picked and ruined it.

I'm getting old, that's the thing! What's in me now won't be there anymore.

Wrong does not cease to be wrong because the majority share in it.

Konstantin Levin did not like talking and hearing about the beauty of nature. Words for him took away the beauty of what he saw.

The march of humanity, springing as it does from an infinite multitude of individual wills, is continuous.

I feel not only that I cannot disappear, as nothing disappears in the world, but that I will always be and have always been. I feel that, besides me, above me, spirits live, and that in this world there is truth.