I wanted feeling to guide us in life, and not life to be the guide to feeling.

This history of culture will explain to us the motives, the conditions of life, and the thought of the writer or reformer.

One must try to make one's life as pleasant as possible. I'm alive and it's not my fault, which means I must somehow go on living the best I can, without bothering anybody, until I die.''But what makes you live? With such thoughts, you'll sit without moving, without undertaking anything...''Life won't leave one alone as it is.

There are no conditions of life to which a man cannot accustom himself, especially if he sees that every one around him lives in the same way.

And where love ends, hate begins

It occurred to him that his scarcely perceptible attempts to struggle against what was considered good by the most highly placed people, those scarcely noticeable impulses which he had immediately suppressed, might have been the real thing, and all the rest false.

He suffered from an unlucky faculty—common to many men, especially Russians—the faculty of seeing and believing in the possibility of good and truth, and at the same time seeing too clearly the evil and falsity of life to be capable of taking a serious part in it.

- The aim of civilization is to enable us to get enjoyment out of everything.- Well, if that is its aim, I'd rather be a savage.

...but the further the illness progressed the more dubious and preposterous his notions of a kidney became, and the more realistic was his awareness of impending death