“How often we sin, how much we deceive, and all for what?
―
Leo Tolstoy
“Man cannot possess anything as long as he fears death. But to him who does not fear it,
everything belongs. If there was no suffering, man would not know his limits, would not know
himself.
―
Leo Tolstoy
“The most mentally deranged people are certainly those who see in others indications of
insanity they do not notice in themselves.”
―
Leo Tolstoy
“Does it ever happen to you," Natasha said to her brother, when they had settled in the
sitting room, "does it ever happen to you that you feel there's nothing more - nothing; that
everything good has already happened? And it's not really boring, but sad?"
"As if it doesn't!" he said. "It's happened to me that everything's fine, everybody's merry, and it
suddenly comes into my head that it's all tiresome and we all ought to die....”
―
Leo Tolstoy
“Respect was invented to cover the empty place where love should be.”
―
Leo Tolstoy
“Therein is the whole business of one’s life; to seek out and save in the soul that which is
perishing.”
―
Leo Tolstoy
“Olenin always took his own path and had an unconscious objection to the beaten tracks.”
―
Leo Tolstoy
“One of the first conditions of happiness is that the link between Man and Nature shall not
be broken.”
―
Leo Tolstoy
“The business of art lies just in this, -- to make that understood and felt which, in the form of
an argument, might be incomprehensible and inaccessible.
―
Leo Tolstoy
“Art should cause violence to be set aside and it is only art that can accomplish this.”
―
Leo Tolstoy
“And then all at once love turns up, and you're done for, done for.”
―
Leo Tolstoy
“He never chooses an opinion, he just wears whatever happens to be in style.”
―
Leo Tolstoy
“There is one thing, and only one thing, in which it is granted to you to be free in life, all else
being beyond your power: that is to recognize and profess the truth.”
―
Leo Tolstoy
“I'm like a starving man who has been given food. Maybe he's cold, and his clothes are torn,
and he's ashamed, but he's not unhappy.”
―
Leo Tolstoy
“Without knowing what I am and why I am here, life's impossible; and that I can't know, and
so I can't live," Levin said to himself.”
―
Leo Tolstoy
