“He looked at her as a man might look at a faded flower he had plucked, in which it was
difficult for him to trace the beauty that had made him pick and so destroy it”
―
Leo Tolstoy
“Then as now much time was spent arguing about the rights of women, husband-and-wife
relationships and freedom and rights within marriage, but Natasha had no interest in any such
questions.
Questions like these, then as now, existed exclusively for people who see marriage only in
terms of satisfaction given and received by the married couple, though this is only one
principle of married life rather than its overall meaning, which lies in the family.”
―
Leo Tolstoy
“There was within him a deep unexpressed conviction that all would be well, but that one
must not trust to this and still less speak about it, but must only attend to one's own work. And
he did his work, giving his whole strength to the task.”
―
Leo Tolstoy
“I can’t think of you and myself apart. You and I are the same to me”
―
Leo Tolstoy
“Well, pray if you like, only you'd do better to use your judgment.”
―
Leo Tolstoy
“What a terrible thing war is, what a terrible thing!”
―
Leo Tolstoy
“The march of humanity, springing as it does from an infinite multitude of individual wills, is
continuous.”
―
Leo Tolstoy
“I have learned what must be, and therefore have come to see the whole horror of what is.”
―
Leo Tolstoy
“He wanted and needed their love, but felt none towards them. He now had neither love nor
humility nor purity”
―
Leo Tolstoy
“The most important acts, both for the one who accomplishes them and for his fellow
creatures, are those that have remote consequences.”
―
Leo Tolstoy
“To say that a work of art is good, but incomprehensible to the majority of men, is the same
as saying of some kind of food that it is very good but that most people can’t eat it.”
―
Leo Tolstoy
“Olenin always took his own path and had an unconscious objection to the beaten tracks.”
―
Leo Tolstoy
“One can live magnificently in this world if one knows how to work and how to love.”
―
Leo Tolstoy
“Just when the question of how to live had become clearer to him, a new insoluble problem
presented itself - Death.”
―
Leo Tolstoy
“Death, the inevitable end of everything, confronted him for the first time with irresistible
force.
―
Leo Tolstoy
