“It's different for you and me. You study, you become enlightened; I study, I become
confused.”
―
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
“You need feeling, emotion, to create. You can't create out of indifference.”
―
Leo Tolstoy
Everything that I know, I know only because I love.
―
Leo Tolstoy
“I have lived through much and now I think I have found what is needed for happiness. A
quiet, secluded life in the country with possibility of being useful to people.”
―
Leo Tolstoy
Pure, perfect sorrow is as impossible as pure and perfect joy.”
―
Leo Tolstoy
“Natasha, with a vigorous turn from her heel on to her toe, walked over to the middle of the
room and stood still... Natasha took the first note, her throat swelled, her bosom heaved, a
serious expression came into her face. She was thinking of no one and of nothing at that
moment, and from her smiling mouth poured forth notes, those notes that anyone can produce
at the same intervals, and hold for the same length of time, yet a thousand times leave us
cold, and the thousand and first time they set us thrilling and weeping.”
―
Leo Tolstoy
“It's too easy to criticize a man when he's out of favour, and to make him shoulder the
blame for everybody else's mistakes.”
―
Leo Tolstoy
“I killed the wife when I first tasted sensual joys without love, and then it was that I killed my
wife.”
―
Leo Tolstoy
“There are two aspects," Alexey Alexandrovitch resumed: "those who take part and those
who look on; and love for such spectacles is an unmistakable proof of a low degree of
development in the spectator, I admit, but . . .”
―
Leo Tolstoy
“It seems that only God can know the truth; it is to Him alone we must appeal, and from Him
alone expect mercy.”
―
Leo Tolstoy
“But any acquisition that doesn't correspond to the labour expended is dishonest”
―
Leo Tolstoy
“But live while you live, tomorrow you die...”
―
Leo Tolstoy
“Yes, there is something uncanny, demonic and fascinating in her.”
―
Leo Tolstoy
“I'll get angry in the same way with the coachman Ivan, argue in the same way, speak my
mind inappropriately, there will be the same wall between my soul's holy of holies and other
people, even my wife, I'll accuse her in the same way of my own fear and then regret it, I'll fail
in the same way to understand with my reason why I pray, and yet I will pray--but my life now,
my whole life, regardless of all that may happen to me, every minute of it, is not only not
meaningless, as it was before, but has the unquestionable meaning of the good which it is in
my power to put into it!”
―
Leo Tolstoy
