“Drops Dripped. Quiet talk went on. Horses neighed and scuffled. Someone snored.”
―
Leo Tolstoy
“But that's the whole aim of civilization: to make everything a source of enjoyment.”
―
Leo Tolstoy
“A cigar is a sort of thing, not exactly a pleasure, but the crown and outward sign of
pleasure.”
―
Leo Tolstoy
What did that show? It showed that he had lived well, but thought badly.”
―
Leo Tolstoy
“The subject of history is the life of peoples and mankind.”
―
Leo Tolstoy
“Lay me down like a stone oh God, and raise me up like a new bread".
―
Leo Tolstoy
“I suffered most from the feeling that custom was daily petrifying our lives into one fixed
shape, that our minds were losing their freedom and becoming enslaved to the steady
passionless course of time.”
―
Leo Tolstoy
“War is the most painful act of subjection to the laws of God that can be required of the
human will.”
―
Leo Tolstoy
“We can know only that we know nothing. And that is the highest degree of human wisdom.”
―
Leo Tolstoy
“In that brief glance Vronsky has time to notice the restrained animation that played over
her face and fluttered between her shining eyes and the barely noticeable smile that curved
her red lips. It was as if a surplus of something so overflowed her being that it expressed itself
beyond her will, now in the brightness of her glance, now in her smile. She deliberately
extinguished the light in her her eyes, but it shone against her will in a barely noticeable
smile.”
―
Leo Tolstoy
“I don't allow myself to doubt myself even for a moment.”
―
Leo Tolstoy
“He felt that he was himself and did not wish to be anyone else. He only wished now to be
better than he had been formerly”
―
Leo Tolstoy
“Art is the uniting of the subjective with the objective, of nature with reason, of the
unconscious with the conscious, and therefore art is the highest means of knowledge.”
―
Leo Tolstoy
“Come, what did I say, repeat it? he would ask. But I could never repeat anything, so
ludicrous it seemed that he should talk to me, not of himself or me, but of something else, as
though it mattered what happened outside us. Only much later I began to have some slight
understanding of his cares and to be interested in them.”
―
Leo Tolstoy
