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

If you want to be happy, be.

If patriotism is good, then Christianity, which gives peace, is an idle dream, and the sooner this teaching is eradicated, the better. But if Christianity really gives peace, and if we really want peace, then patriotism is a leftover from barbarous times, which must not only not be evoked and taught, as we now do, but which must be eradicated by all means of preaching, persuasion, contempt, and ridicule. If Christianity is the truth, and if we wish to live in peace, then we must not only have no sympathy for the power of our country, but must even rejoice in its weakening and contribute to it.

We should show life neither as it is or as it ought to be, but only as we see it in our dreams.

I ask one thing: I ask the right to hope and suffer as I do now." Vronsky

All governments are in equal measure good and evil. The best ideal is anarchy.

A good player who loses at chess is genuinely convinced hat he has lost because of a mistake, and he looks for this mistake in the beginning of his game, but forgets that there were also mistakes at ever step in the course of the game, that none of his moves was perfect. The mistake he pays attention to is conspicuous only because his opponent took advantage of it.