“If you want to overcome the whole world, overcome yourself.”

“The torments of a proud decision, a deep conscience! God, in whom he did not believe, and his truth were overcoming his heart, which still did not want to submit.”

“In such cases, 'we overcome our moral feeling if necessary', freedom, peace, conscience even, all, all are brought into the market.”

“You cannot imagine what wrath and sadness overcome your whole soul when a great idea, which you have long cherished as holy, is caught up by the ignorant and dragged forth before fools like themselves into the street, and you suddenly meet it in the market unrecognizable, in the mud, absurdly set up, without proportion, without harmony, the plaything of foolish louts!”

“It seems to me that if there were such a man, for example, as would seize a red-hot bar of iron and clutch it in his hand, with the purpose of measuring his strength of mind, and in the course of ten seconds would be overcoming the intolerable pain and would finally overcome it, this man, it seems to me, would endure something like what was experience now, in these ten seconds, by Nikolai Vsevolodovich.”

“He precisely lays it to his and his colleagues credit that they have finally overcome freedom, and have done so in order to make people happy.”

“I know that my youth will triumph over everything - every disillusionment, every disgust with life. I’ve asked myself many times whether there is in in the world any despair that would overcome this frantic and perhaps unseemly thirst for life in me, and I've come to the conclusion that there isn't...”