“Therefore, all these causes-billions of causes-coincided so as to bring about what
happened. And consequently none of them was the exclusive cause of the event, but the
event had to take place simply because it had to take place.”
―
Leo Tolstoy
“Not one word, not one gesture of yours shall I, could I, ever forget...”
―
Leo Tolstoy
“Whatever our fate is or may be, we have made it and do not complain of it."
―
Leo Tolstoy
“excuse me' he added, taking the opera glasses out of her hands and looking over her bare
shoulder at the row of boxes opposite, 'i'm afraid i'm becoming ridiculous
―
Leo Tolstoy
“The Jew is that sacred being, who has brought down from Heaven the everlasting fire, and
has illumined with it the entire world. He is the religious source, spring, and fountain out of
which all the rest of the peoples have drawn their beliefs and their religions.”
―
Leo Tolstoy
“In order to forgive, one must have lived through what I have lived through, and may God
spare her that.”
―
Leo Tolstoy
“Just as a painter needs light in order to put the finishing touches to his picture, so I need
an inner light, which I feel I never have enough of in the autumn.”
―
Leo Tolstoy
“That only shows you have no heart,’ she said. But her eyes said that she knew he had a
heart, and that was why she was afraid of him”
―
Leo Tolstoy
“no disease suffered by a live man can be known, for every living person has his own
peculiarities and always has his own peculiar, personal, novel, complicated disease, unknown
to medicine -- not a disease of the lungs, liver, skin, heart, nerves, and so on mentioned in
medical books, but a disease consisting of one of the innumerable combinations of the
maladies of those organs. This simple thought could not occur to the doctors (as it cannot
occur to a wizard that he is unable to work his charms) because the business of their lives was
to cure, and they received money for it and had spent the best years of their lives on that
business. But above all that thought was kept out of their minds by the fact that they saw they
were really useful [...] Their usefulness did not depend on making the patient swallow
substances for the most part harmful (the harm was scarcely perceptible because they were
given in small doses) but they were useful, necessary, and indispensable because they
satisfied a mental need of the invalid and those who loved her -- and that is why there are, and
always will be, pseudo-healers, wise women, homoeopaths, and allopaths. They satisfied that
eternal human need for hope of relief, for sympathy, and that something should be done,
which is felt by those who are suffering.”
―
Leo Tolstoy
“He felt that all his hitherto dissipated and dispersed forces were gathered and directed with
terrible energy towards one blissful goal.”
―
Leo Tolstoy
“Sitting in his old schoolroom on the sofa with little cushions on the arms and looking into
Natasha's wildly eager eyes, Rostov was carried back into that world of home and childhood
which had no meaning for anyone else, but gave him some of the greatest pleasure in his life.”
―
Leo Tolstoy
“Government is an association of men who do violence to the rest of us.”
―
Leo Tolstoy
“Is it possible to love a woman who will never understand the profoundest interests of my
life?
Is it possible to love a woman simply for her beauty,
to love the statue of a woman?”
―
Leo Tolstoy
“if they hadn’t both been pretending, but had had what is called a heart-to-heart talk, that is,
simply told each other just what they were thinking and feeling, then they would just have
looked into each other’s eyes, and Constantine would only have said: ‘You’re dying, dying,
dying!’ – while Nicholas would simply have replied: ‘I know I’m dying, but I’m afraid, afraid,
afraid!’ That’s all they would have said if they’d been talking straight from the heart. But it was
impossible to live that way, so Levin tried to do what he’d been trying to do all his life without
being able to, what a great many people could do so well, as he observed, and without which
life was impossible: he tried to say something different from what he thought, and he always
felt it came out false, that his brother caught him out and was irritated by it.”
―
Leo Tolstoy
“Pierre was one of those people who are strong only when they feel themselves perfectly
pure.”
―
Leo Tolstoy
