A man can live and be healthy without killing animals for food; therefore, if he eats meat, he participates in taking animal life merely for the sake of his appetite.

Loving with human love, one may pass from love to hatred; but divine love cannot change. Nothing, not even death, can shatter it. It is all the very nature of the soul. Love is life. All, all that I understand, I understand only because of love. All is bound up in love alone. Love is God and dying means for me a particle of love, to go back to the universal and eternal source of love.

In Varenka, she realized that one has but to forget oneself and love others, and one will be calm, happy, and noble.

Art should cause violence to be set aside and it is only art that can accomplish this.

Suddenly I heard the words of Christ and understood them, and life and death ceased to seem to me evil, and instead of despair I experienced happiness and the joy of life undisturbed by death.

The happiness of men consists in life. And life is in labor.

Then he thought himself unhappy, but happiness was all in the future; now he felt that the best happiness was already in the past.