“But she was not even grateful to him for it; nothing good on Pierre's part seemed to her to
be an effort, it seemed so natural for him to be kind to everyone that there was no merit in his
kindness.”
―
Leo Tolstoy
“I work, I want to do something, but I had forgotten it must all end; I had forgotten--death.”
―
Leo Tolstoy
“She danced the dance so well, so well indeed, so perfectly, that Anisya Fyodorovna, who
handed her at once the kerchief she needed in the dance, had tears in her eyes, though she
laughed as she watched that slender and graceful little countess, reared in silk and velvet,
belonging to another world than hers, who was yet able to understand all that was in Anisya
and her father and her mother and her aunt and every Russian soul.”
―
Leo Tolstoy
“Everything I know, I know because I love.”
―
Leo Tolstoy
“You're not racing?" joked the officer.
"Mine is a harder race," Alexei Alexandrovich replied respectfully.
And though the reply did not mean anything, the officer pretended that he had heard a clever
phrase from a clever man and had perfectly understood.”
―
Leo Tolstoy
“One must be cunning and wicked in this world.”
―
Leo Tolstoy
“it's much better to do good in a way that no one knows anything about it.”
―
Leo Tolstoy
“Art is not a handicraft; it is the transmission of feeling the artist has experienced.
―
Leo Tolstoy
“Writing laws is easy, but governing is difficult.”
―
Leo Tolstoy
“He sought his former accustomed fear of death and did not find it. "Where is it? What
death?" There was no fear because there was no death.
In place of death there was light.”
―
Leo Tolstoy
“But our idea is that the wolves should be fed and the sheep kept safe. ”
―
Leo Tolstoy
“Respect is an invention of people who want to cover up the empty place where love should
be.”
―
Leo Tolstoy
“A writer is dear and necessary for us only in the measure of which he reveals to us the
inner workings of his very soul.”
―
Leo Tolstoy
“To live in the needs of the day, find forgetfulness.”
―
Leo Tolstoy
“What she did not know, and would never have believed, was that though her soul seemed
to have been grown over with an impenetrable layer of mould, some delicate blades of grass,
young and tender, were already pushing their way upwards, destined to take root and sendout living shoots so effectively that her all-consuming grief would soon be lost and forgotten.
The wound was healing from inside.”
―
Leo Tolstoy
