“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
“They ought to find out how to vaccinate for love, like smallpox.”
―
Leo Tolstoy
“Our body is a machine for living. It is organized for that, it is its nature. Let life go on in it
unhindered and let it defend itself.”
―
Leo Tolstoy
“It is amazing how complete is the delusion that beauty is goodness. A handsome woman
talks nonsense, you listen and hear not nonsense but cleverness. She says and does horrid
things, and you see only charm. And if a handsome woman does not say stupid or horrid
things, you at once persuade yourself that she is wonderfully clever and moral.”
―
Leo Tolstoy
“He felt now that he was not simply close to her, but that he did not know where he ended and
she began.”
―
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
But he had done neither the one nor the other, yet he continued to live, think, and feel, had
even at that very time got married, experienced many joys, and been happy whenever he was
not thinking of the meaning of his life.
―
Leo Tolstoy
“We are conscious of the force of man's life, and we call it freedom”
―
Leo Tolstoy
“Sometimes she did not know what she feared, what she desired: whether she feared or
desired what had been or what would be, and precisely what she desired, she did not know.”
―
Leo Tolstoy
“The most mentally deranged people are those who see in others indications of insanity
they do not notice in themselves.”
―
Leo Tolstoy
“I wanted movement and not a calm course of existence. I wanted excitement and danger and
the chance to sacrifice myself for my love.”
―
Leo Tolstoy
“oh God! what am I to do if I love nothing but fame and men's esteem?”
―
Leo Tolstoy
“But that's the whole aim of civilization: to make everything a source of enjoyment.”
―
Leo Tolstoy
“Why, of course," objected Stepan Arkadyevitch. "But that's just the aim of civilization—to
make everything a source of enjoyment.”
―
Leo Tolstoy
“As though tears were the indispensable oil without which the machinery of mutual
confidence could not run smoothly between the two sister, the sisters after their tears talked,
not of what was uppermost in their minds, but though they talked of outside matters, they
understood each other.”
―
Leo Tolstoy
