…the majority of men do not think in order to know the truth, but in order to assure themselves that the life which they lead, and which is agreeable and habitual to them, is the one which coincides with the truth.

To speak of it would be giving importance to that which has none.

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

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

Man by violating his own feelings becomes cruel. And how deeply seated in the human heart is the injunction not to take life.

A free thinker used to be a man who had been educated on ideas of religion, law, morality, and had arrived at free thought by virtue of his own struggle and toil; but now a new type of born freethinker has been appearing, who’ve never even heard that there have been laws of morality and religion, and that there are authorities, but who simply grow up with negative ideas about everything, that is savages.

God forgive me everything!' she said, feeling the impossibility of struggling.