“truth, like gold, is to be obtained not by its growth, but by washing away from it all that is
not gold.”
―
Leo Tolstoy
“If, then, I were asked for the most important advice I could give, that which I considered to be
the most useful to the men of our century, I should simply say: in the name of God, stop a
moment, cease your work, look around you.”
―
Leo Tolstoy
“No one can attain to truth by himself. Only by laying stone on stone with the cooperation of
all, by the millions of generations from our forefather Adam to our own times, is that temple
reared which is to be a worthy dwelling place of the Great God.”
―
Leo Tolstoy
“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?”
―
Leo Tolstoy
“Nothing is so necessary for a young man as the company of intelligent women.
―
Leo Tolstoy
“The only happy marriages I know are arranged ones.”
―
Leo Tolstoy
“In captivity, in the shed, Pierre had learned, not with his mind, but with his whole being, his
life, that man is created for happiness, that happiness is within him, in the satisfying of natural
human needs, and that all unhappiness comes not from lack, but from superfluity; but now, in
these last three weeks of the march, he had learned a new and more comforting truth - he had
learned that there is nothing frightening in the world. He had learned that, as there is no
situation in the world in which a man can be happy and perfectly free, so there is no situation
in which he can be perfectly unhappy and unfree. He had learned that there is a limit to
suffering and a limit to freedom, and that those limits are very close; that the man who suffers
because one leaf is askew in his bed of roses, suffers as much as he now suffered falling
asleep on the bare, damp ground, one side getting cold as the other warmed up; that when he
used to put on his tight ballroom shoes, he suffered just as much as now, when he walked
quite barefoot (his shoes had long since worn out) and his feet were covered with sores.”
―
Leo Tolstoy
“God gave the day, God gave the strength.”
―
Leo Tolstoy
“I often think that men don't understand what is noble and what is ignorant, though they always
talk about it.”
―
Leo Tolstoy
“Yet time and again, from different approaches, I kept coming to the same conclusion, that I
could not have come into the world without any cause, reason, or meaning; that I could not be
the fledgeling fallen from the nest that I felt myself to be. If I lie on my back crying in the tall
grass, like a fledgeling, it is because I know that my mother brought me into the world, kept me
warm, fed me and loved me. But where is she, that mother? If I am abandoned, then who has
abandoned me? I cannot hide myself from the fact that someone who loved me gave birth to
me. Who is this someone? Again, God.”
―
Leo Tolstoy
“Never, never marry, my friend. Here’s my advice to you: don’t marry until you can tell
yourself that you’ve done all you could, and until you’ve stopped loving the woman you’ve
chosen, until you see her clearly, otherwise you’ll be cruelly and irremediably mistaken. Marry
when you’re old and good for nothing...Otherwise all that’s good and lofty in you will be lost.”
―
Leo Tolstoy
“Rostov was not listening to the soldier. He looked at the snowflakes dancing above the fire
and remembered the Russian winter with a warm, bright house, a fluffy fur coat, swift sleighs,
a healthy body, and all the love and care of a family. “And why did I come here?” he
wondered.”
―
Leo Tolstoy
“He walked down, for a long while avoiding looking at her as at the sun, but seeing her, as
one does the sun, without looking.”
―
Leo Tolstoy
“My field was God’s earth. Wherever I ploughed, there was my field. Land was free. It was a
thing no man called his own. Labor was the only thing men called their own.”
―
Leo Tolstoy
“Respect is an invention of people who want to cover up the empty place where love should
be.”
―
Leo Tolstoy
