It is within my power either to serve God or not to serve Him. Serving Him, I add to my own good and the good of the whole world. Not serving Him, I forfeit my own good and deprive the world of that good, which was in my power to create.

Only greatly insolent people establish a religious law which is to be taken for granted by others, which should be accepted by everyone on faith, without any discussion or doubts. Why must people do this?

What time can be more beautiful when the one in which the finest virtues, innocent cheerfulness and indefinable longing for love constitute the sole motives of your life.

In education, once more, the chief things are equality and freedom.

People look like rivers very much: water is everywhere the same, but the rivers are narrow, fast, wide, pure, cold, muddy and warm. The people are the same. They have the rudiment of every human habit in them and they behave according to them. Sometimes they even do not look like themselves, but they still stay whatever they are.

He sought his former accustomed fear of death and did not find it. "Where is it? What death?" There was no fear because there was no death. In place of death there was light.

At one time,' Golenishchev continued, either not observing or not willing to observe that both Anna and Vronsky wanted to speak, 'at one time a freethinker was a man who had been brought up in the conception of religion, law, and morality, who reached freethought only after conflict and difficulty. But now a new type of born freethinkers has appeared, who grow up without so much as hearing that there used to be laws of morality, or religion, that authorities existed. They grow up in ideas of negation in everything - in other words, utter savages.