““I know him, the falsity in which he's utterly steeped?... Could one, with any feeling, live as he is living with me? He understands nothing, and feels nothing. Could a man of any feeling live in the same house with his unfaithful wife? Could he talk to her, call her 'my dear'? ... He's not a man, he's an official machine. He doesn't understand that I'm your wife, that he's outside, that he's superfluous.””
“Stepan Arkadyevitch was a truthful man in his relations with himself. He was incapable of deceiving himself and persuading himself that he repented of his conduct.”
Anna Karenina
“There was no solution, but that universal solution which life gives to all questions, even the most complex and insoluble. That answer is: one must live in the needs of the day—that is, forget oneself...”
Anna Karenina
“Stepan Arkadyevitch took in and read a liberal paper, not an extreme one, but one advocating the views held by the majority. And in spite of the fact that science, art, and politics had no special int...”
Anna Karenina
“Stepan Arkadyevitch had not chosen his political opinions or his views; these political opinions and views had come to him of themselves, just as he did not choose the shapes of his hat and coat, but ...”
Anna Karenina
“Stepan Arkadyevitch … liked his newspaper, as he did his cigar after dinner, for the slight fog it diffused in his brain.”
Anna Karenina