Quotes: Anna Karenina

After spending more than 6 months in reading, today I finished reading Anna Karenina.  I can very well see why Tolstoy is praised by so many people.  Anna Karenina was an amazing read.  I sure have to read it once again to make use of the novel in my own life.  I hope to read it again some time.  Some quotes from the novel, as usual:

• Women with a shadow usually come to a bad end.
• To know love, one must make mistakes and then correct them.
• Alexey Alexandrovitch was standing face to face with life, with the possibility of his wife's loving someone other than himself, and this seemed to him very irrational and incomprehensible because it was life itself.
• "I do my best, Konstantin Dmitrievitch, d'ye see, as I would for my own father.  I don't like bad work myself, nor would I let another man do it.  What's good for the master's good for us too.  To look out yonder now," said Vassily, pointing, "it does one's heart good."
• A cigar is a sort of thing, not exactly a pleasure, but the crown and outward sign of pleasure.
• The walls of home are a support.
• Whatever our destiny is or may be, we have made it ourselves, and we do not complain of it.
• There is a way out of every position.
• God sends the cross and sends the strength to bear it.
• If it's a good thing for you, it's a good thing for everyone.
• No sort of activity is likely to be lasting if it is not founded on self-interest, that's a universal principle, a philosophical principle.
• Hypocrisy in anything whatever may deceive the cleverest and most penetrating man, but the least wide-awake of children recognizes it, and is revolted by it, however ingeniously it may be disguised.
• God gave the day, God gave the strength.  And the day and the strength were consecrated to labor, and that labor was its own reward.  For whom the labor?  What would be its fruits?  These were idle considerations -- beside the point.
• Anything's better than lying and deceit.
• To sleep well one ought to work, and to enjoy oneself one ought to work too.
• Women are the chief stumbling block in a man's career.  It's hard to love a woman and do anything.  There's only one way of having love conveniently without its being a hindrance -- that's marriage.
• What's the use of being dreary?
• If one wants the result, one must admit the means.
• There's less charm in life, when one thinks of death, but there's more peace.
• Love those that hate you, but to love those one hates is impossible.
• "I have heard it said that women love men even for their vices," Anna began suddenly, "but I hate him for his virtues."
• I cannot paint a Christ that is not in my heart.
• It is hard for anyone who is dissatisfied not to blame someone else, and especially the person nearest of all to him, for the ground of his dissatisfaction.
• One may sit for several hours at a stretch with one's legs crossed in the same position, if one knows that there's nothing to prevent one's changing one's position; but if a man knows that he must remain sitting so with crossed legs, then cramps come on, the legs begin to twitch and to strain towards the spot to which one would like to draw them.
• But one must call things by their names.
• A wife is a care, but it's worse when she's not a wife.
• It's awful to think that any outsider can shatter our happiness.
• If one loves anyone, one loves the whole person, just as they are and not as one would like them to be.
• I don't want to prove anything; I merely want to live, to do no one harm but myself.  I have the right to do that, haven't I?
• In love there's no more nor less.  I love my daughter with one love, and her with another.
• Energy rests upon love; and come as it will, there's no forcing it.
• There are no conditions to which a man cannot become used, especially if he sees that all around him are living in the same way.
• In order to carry through any undertaking in family life, there must necessarily be either complete division between the husband and wife, or loving agreement.  When the relations of a couple are vacillating and neither one thing nor the other, no sort of enterprise can be undertaken.  Many families remain for years in the same place, though both husband and wife are sick of it, simply because there is neither complete division nor agreement between them.
• Respect was invented to cover the empty place where love should be.
• Where love ends, hate begins.
• Goodness is outside the chain of cause and effect.
• I know nothing, nothing, and I can know nothing but what has been told to me and all men.