“The most important acts, both for the one who accomplishes them and for his fellow
creatures, are those that have remote consequences.”
―
Leo Tolstoy
“I don't think badly of people. I like everybody, and I'm sorry for everybody.”
―
Leo Tolstoy
“truth, like gold, is to be obtained not by its growth, but by washing away from it all that is
not gold.”
―
Leo Tolstoy
“Am I mad, to see what others do not see, or are they mad who are responsible for all that I
am seeing?”
―
Leo Tolstoy
“There had been in his past, as in every man's, actions, recognized by him as bad, for
which his conscience ought to have tormented him; but the memory of these evil actions was
far from causing him so much suffering as those trivial but humiliating reminiscences.”
―
Leo Tolstoy
“Music makes me forget myself, my real position; it transports me to some other position
not my own. Under the influence of music it seems to me that I feel what I do not really feel,
that I understand what I do not understand, that I can do what I cannot do. I explain it by the
fact that music acts like yawning, like laughter: I am not sleepy, but I yawn when I see
someone yawning; there is nothing for me to laugh at, but I laugh when I hear people
laughing.
Music carries me immediately and directly into the mental condition in which the man was who
composed it. My soul merges with his and together with him I pass from one condition into
another, but why this happens I don't know.”
―
Leo Tolstoy
“marveling at this boldness and ease in her presence, and not for one second losing sight
of her, though he did not look at her. He felt as though the sun were coming near him.”
―
Leo Tolstoy
“Constant idleness should be included in the tortures of hell, but it is, on the contrary,
considered to be one of the joys of paradise.”
―
Leo Tolstoy
“A free thinker used to be a man who had been educated on ideas of religion, law, morality,
and had arrived at free thought by virtue of his own struggle and toil; but now a new type of
born freethinker has been appearing, who’ve never even heard that there have been laws of
morality and religion, and that there are authorities, but who simply grow up with negative
ideas about everything, that is savages.”
―
Leo Tolstoy
He felt like a man who, after straining his eyes to peer into the remote distance, finds what
he was seeking at his very feet. All his life he had been looking over the heads of those
around him, while he had only to look before him without straining his eyes.”
―
Leo Tolstoy
“What I think about vivisection is that if people admit that they have the right to take or
endanger the life of living beings for the benefit of many, there will be no limit to their cruelty.”
―
Leo Tolstoy
“Formerly (it had begun almost from childhood and kept growing till full maturity), whenever
he had tried to do something that would be good for everyone, for mankind, for Russia, for the
district, for the whole village, he had noticed that thinking about it was pleasant, but the doing
itself was always awkward, there was no full assurance that the thing was absolutely
necessary, and the doing itself, which at the start had seemed so big, kept diminishing and
diminishing, dwindling to nothing; while now, after his marriage, when he began to limit himself
more and more to living for himself, though he no longer experienced any joy at the thought of
what he was doing, he felt certain that his work was necessary, saw that it turned out much
better than before and that it was expanding more and more.”
―
Leo Tolstoy
“Everything seemed pleasant and easy to Nikolai during the first part of his stay in
Voronezh and, as generally happens when a man is in a pleasant state of mind, everything
went well and easily.”
―
Leo Tolstoy
“The Jew is that sacred being, who has brought down from Heaven the everlasting fire, and
has illumined with it the entire world. He is the religious source, spring, and fountain out of
which all the rest of the peoples have drawn their beliefs and their religions.”
―
Leo Tolstoy
