“The self-indulgent man craves for all pleasant things... and is led by his appetite to choose these at the cost of everything else.”

“Man staggers through life yapped at by his reason, pulled and shoved by his appetites, whispered to by fears, beckoned by hopes. Small wonder that what he craves most is self-forgetting.”

“Sexual appetite, like any other appetite, grows by indulgence”

“This appetite to choose death by pleasure if it is available to choose - this appetite of your people unable to choose appetites, this is the death.”

“The chief reason why the prince was so particularly disagreeable to Vronsky was that he could not help seeing himself in him. And what he saw in this mirror did not gratify his self-esteem. He was a very stupid and very self-satisfied and very healthy and very well-washed man, and nothing else... He was equable and not cringing with his superiors, was free and ingratiating in his behavior with his equals, and was contemptuously indulgent with his inferiors... for this prince he was an inferior, and his contemptuous and indulgent attitude to him revolted him.”

“The only thing about a man that is a man . . . is his mind. Everything else you can find in a pig or a horse.”