“Count Lev Nikolayevich Tolstoy, commonly referred to in English as Leo Tolstoy, was a
Russian novelist, writer, essayist, philosopher, Christian anarchist, pacifist, educational
reformer, moral thinker, and an influential member of the Tolstoy family. As a fiction writer
Tolstoy is widely regarded as one of the greatest of all novelists, particularly noted for his
masterpieces War and Peace and Anna Karenina; in their scope, breadth and realistic
depiction of Russian life, the two books stand at the peak of realistic fiction. As a moral
philosopher he was notable for his ideas on nonviolent resistance through his work The
Kingdom of God is Within You, which in turn influenced such twentieth-century figures as
Mohandas K. Gandhi and Martin Luther King, Jr. Source: Wikipedia”
―
Leo Tolstoy
“If so many men, so many minds, certainly so many hearts, so many kinds of love.”
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Leo Tolstoy
“What a terrible thing war is, what a terrible thing!”
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Leo Tolstoy
“The question of how things will settle down is the only important question...”
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Leo Tolstoy
“You need feeling, emotion, to create. You can't create out of indifference.”
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Leo Tolstoy
“I can’t think of you and myself apart. You and I are the same to me”
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Leo Tolstoy
“Drops Dripped. Quiet talk went on. Horses neighed and scuffled. Someone snored.”
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Leo Tolstoy
“Everything was made bright by her. She was the smile that shed light all around her.”
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Leo Tolstoy
“The only happy marriages I know are arranged ones.”
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Leo Tolstoy
Everything that I know, I know only because I love.
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Leo Tolstoy
“How can he talk like that?" thought Pierre. He considered his friend a model of perfection
because Prince Andrew possessed in the highest degree just the very qualities Pierre lacked,
and which might be best described as strength of will.”
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Leo Tolstoy
“I often think that men don't understand what is noble and what is ignorant, though they always
talk about it.”
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Leo Tolstoy
“Every reform by violence is to be deprecated, because it does little to correct the evil while
men remain as they are, and because wisdom has no need of violence.”
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Leo Tolstoy
“Stepan Arkadyevitch was a truthful man in his relations with himself. He was incapable of
deceiving himself and persuading himself that he repented of his conduct. He could not at this
date repent of the fact that he, a handsome, susceptible man of thirty-four, was not in love with
his wife, the mother of five living and two dead children, and only a year younger than himself.
All he repented of was that he had not succeeded better in hiding it from his wife. But he felt all
the difficulty of his position and was sorry for his wife, his children, and himself. Possibly he
might have managed to conceal his sins better from his wife if he had anticipated that the
knowledge of them would have had such an effect on her. He had never clearly thought out
the subject, but he had vaguely conceived that his wife must long ago have suspected him of
being unfaithful to her, and shut her eyes to the fact. He had even supposed that she, a worn-
out woman no longer young or good-looking, and in no way remarkable or interesting, merely
a good mother, ought from a sense of fairness to take an indulgent view. It had turned out
quite the other way.”
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Leo Tolstoy
“A quiet secluded life in the country, with the possibility of being useful to people to whom it
is easy to do good, and who are not accustomed to have it done to them; then work which one
hopes may be of some use; then rest, nature, books, music, love for one’s neighbor — such is
my idea of happiness.”
―
Leo Tolstoy
