“Olenin always took his own path and had an unconscious objection to the beaten tracks.”
―
Leo Tolstoy
In those days also people loved, envied, sought truth and virtue, and where carried away by
passions; and there was the same complex mental and moral life among the upper classes,
where were in some instances even more refined than now. If we have come to believe in the
perversity and coarse violence of that period, that is only because the traditions, memoirs,
stories, and novels that have been handed to us, record for the most part exceptional cases of
violence and brutality. To suppose that the predominant characteristic of that period was
turbulence, is as unjust as it would before a man, seeing nothing but the tops of trees beyond
a hill, to conclude that there was nothing to be found in that locality but trees.”
―
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
“Art should cause violence to be set aside and it is only art that can accomplish this.”
―
Leo Tolstoy
“The wife did not leave her own room, the husband had not been at home for three days.
The children ran wild all over the house; the English governess quarreled with the
housekeeper, and wrote”
―
Leo Tolstoy
"Why, whatever loathsome thoughts can you have?" asked Dolly, smiling.
―
Leo Tolstoy
“She did not want to talk of her sorrow, but with that sorrow in her heart she could not talk of
outside matters.”
―
Leo Tolstoy
“There are two sides to the life of every man, his individual life which is the more free the
more abstract it's interests, and his elemental swarm-life in which he inevitably obeys laws laid
down for him”
―
Leo Tolstoy
“Thus the truth—that his life should be directed by the spiritual element which is its basis,
which manifests itself as love, and which is so natural to man—this truth, in order to force a
way to man’s consciousness, had to struggle not merely against the obscurity with which it
was expressed and the intentional and unintentional distortions surrounding it, but also against
deliberate violence, which by means of persecutions and punishments sought to compel men
to accept religious laws authorized by the rulers and conflicting with the truth.”
―
Leo Tolstoy
“All this was clear to me, and I was glad and at peace. Then it is as if someone is saying to
me, "See that you remember." And I awoke.”
―
Leo Tolstoy
“Only by taking infinitesimally small units for observation (the differential of history, that is,
the individual tendencies of men) and attaining to the art of integrating them (that is, finding
the sum of these infinitesimals) can we hope to arrive at the laws of history.”
―
Leo Tolstoy
“But what can I do?' - I answer those who speak thus. - '... must I therefore not point out the
evil which I clearly, unquestionably see?”
―
Leo Tolstoy
“Am I mad, to see what others do not see, or are they mad who are responsible for all that I
am seeing?”
―
Leo Tolstoy
Now, however, he had learned to see the great, the eternal, the infinite in everything, and
therefore, in order to look at it, to enjoy his contemplation of it, he naturally discarded teh
telescope through which he had till then been gazing over the heads of men, and joyfully
surveyed the ever-changeing, eternally great, unfathomable, and infinite life around him. And
the closer he looked, the happier and more seren he was. The awful question: What for? a
simple answer was now always ready in his soul: Because there is a God, that God without
whose will not one hair of a man's head falls.”
―
Leo Tolstoy
“But every acquisition that is disproportionate to the labor spent on it is dishonest.”
―
Leo Tolstoy
