“In everything, almost in everything, I wrote I was guided by the need of collecting ideas
which, linked together, would be the expression of myself, though each individual idea,
expressed separately in words, loses its meaning, is horribly debased when only one of the
links, of which it forms a part, is taken by itself. But the interlinking of these ideas is not, I think,
an intellectual process, but something else, and it is impossible to express the source of this
interlinking directly in words; it can only be done indirectly by describing images, actions, and
situations in words.”
―
Leo Tolstoy
“At the advent of danger there are always two voices that speak with equal force in the
human heart: one very reasonably invites a man to consider the nature of the peril and the
means of escaping it; the other, with a still greater show of reason, argues that it is too
depressing and painful to think of the danger since it is not in man's power to foresee
everything and avert the general march of events, and it is better therefore to shut one's eyes
to the disagreeable until it actually comes, and to think instead of what is pleasant. When a
man is alone he generally listens to the first voice; in the company of his fellow-men, to the
second.”
―
Leo Tolstoy
“He [Vronsky] himself felt that, except that crazy fellow married to Kitty Shcherbatsky, who,
quite irrelevantly had with rabid virulence told him a lot of pointless nonsense, every nobleman
whose acquaintance he had made had become his partisan.”
―
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
“At one time,' Golenishchev continued, either not observing or not willing to observe that
both Anna and Vronsky wanted to speak, 'at one time a freethinker was a man who had been
brought up in the conception of religion, law, and morality, who reached freethought only after
conflict and difficulty. But now a new type of born freethinkers has appeared, who grow up
without so much as hearing that there used to be laws of morality, or religion, that authorities
existed. They grow up in ideas of negation in everything -- in other words, utter savages.”
―
Leo Tolstoy
“The very nastiest and coarsest, I can't tell you. It is not grief, not dullness, but much worse.
It is as if all that was good in me had hidden itself, and only what is horrid remains.
―
Leo Tolstoy
“He was afraid of defiling the love which filled his soul.”
―
Leo Tolstoy
“He soon felt that the realization of his longing gave him only one grain of the mountain of
bliss he had anticipated. That realization showed him the eternal error men make by imagining
that happiness consists in the gratification of their wishes.”
―
Leo Tolstoy
“Having then for the first time clearly understood that before every man, and before himself,
there lay only suffering, death, and eternal oblivion, he had concluded that to live under such
conditions was impossible; that one must either explain life to oneself so that it does not seem
to be an evil mockery by some sort of devil, or one must shoot oneself.
―
Leo Tolstoy
“[...most men do not try] to recognize the truth, but to persuade themselves that the life they
are leading, which is what they like and are used to, is a life perfectly consistent with truth.”
―
Leo Tolstoy
“A quiet secluded life in the country, with the possibility of being useful to people to whom it is
easy to do good, and who are not accustomed to have it done to them; then work which one
hopes may be of some use; then rest, nature, books, music, love for one's neighbor — such is
my idea of happiness.
―
Leo Tolstoy
“And however much the princess was assured that in our time young people themselves
must settle their fate, she was unable to believe it, as she would have been unable to believe
that in anyone's time the best toys for five-year-old children would be loaded pistols.”
―
Leo Tolstoy
“- Every girl is proud of an offer, Yes, every girl, but not she”
―
Leo Tolstoy
“It's not given to people to judge what's right or wrong. People have eternally been mistaken
and will be mistaken, and in nothing more than in what they consider right and wrong.”
―
Leo Tolstoy
“Yes, there is something in me hateful, repulsive," thought Ljewin, as he came away from
the Schtscherbazkijs', and walked in the direction of his brother's lodgings. "And I don't get on
with other people. Pride, they say. No, I have no pride. If I had any pride, I should not have put
myself in such a position"
―
Leo Tolstoy
