“Ivan Ilych's life had been most simple and most ordinary and therefore most terrible.”

“To be good and lead a good life means to give to others more than one takes from them.”

“Pure and complete sorrow is as impossible as pure and complete joy.”

“Love hinders death. Love is life. All, everything that I understand, I understand only because I love.”

“The only thing that we know is that we know nothing — and that is the highest flight of human wisdom.”

“Everything comes in time to him who knows how to wait.”

“It all comes to this: the simplest way to be happy is to do good.”

“Security is mostly a superstition. It does not exist in nature, nor do the children of men as a whole experience it. Avoiding danger is no safer in the long run than outright exposure. Life is either a daring adventure, or nothing.”

“There never has been security. No man has ever known what he would meet around the next corner; if life were predictable it would cease to be life, and be without flavor.”

“One of the blessings of age is to learn not to part on a note of sharpness, to treasure the moments spent with those we love, and to make them whenever possible good to remember, for time is short.”

“Happiness is not a goal, it is a by-product. Paradoxically, the one sure way not to be happy is deliberately to map out a way of life in which one would please oneself completely and exclusively.”

“The purpose of life is to live it, to taste experience to the utmost, to reach out eagerly and without fear for newer and richer experience.”