“What energy!' I thought. 'Man has conquered everything, and destroyed millions of plants,
yet this one won't submit.”
―
Leo Tolstoy
“I did not myself know what I wanted: I feared life, desired to escape from it, yet still hoped
something of it.”
―
Leo Tolstoy
“He was right in saying that the only certain happiness in life is to live for others.”
―
Leo Tolstoy
“He felt that he was himself and did not wish to be anyone else. He only wished now to be
better than he had been formerly”
―
Leo Tolstoy
“In order to understand, observe, deduce, man must first be conscious of himself as alive
―
Leo Tolstoy
“Life did not stop, and one had to live.”
―
Leo Tolstoy
“Every man had his personal habits, passions, and impulses toward goodness, beauty, and
truth.”
―
Leo Tolstoy
“It's different for you and me. You study, you become enlightened; I study, I become
confused.”
―
Leo Tolstoy
“But she was not even grateful to him for it; nothing good on Pierre's part seemed to her to
be an effort, it seemed so natural for him to be kind to everyone that there was no merit in his
kindness.”
―
Leo Tolstoy
“Then he thought himself unhappy, but happiness was all in the future; now he felt that the
best happiness was already in the past.”
―
Leo Tolstoy
“Each man lives for himself, uses his freedom to achieve his personal goals, and feels with
his whole being that right now he can or cannot do such-and-such an action; but as soon as
he does it, this action, committed at a certain moment in time, becomes irreversible, and
makes itself the property of history, in which is has not a free but a predestined significance. ”
―
Leo Tolstoy
“in infinite space and time everything develops, becomes more perfect and more complex,
is differentiated",is to say nothing at all. Those are all words with no meaning, for in the infinite
is neither complex nor simple, no forward nor backward, or better or worse.”
―
Leo Tolstoy
“But that had been grief--this was joy. Yet that grief and this joy were alike outside all the
ordinary conditions of life; they were loopholes, as it were, in that ordinary life through which
there came glimpses of something sublime. And in the contemplation of this sublime
something the soul was exalted to inconceivable heights of which it had before had no
conception, while reason lagged behind, unable to keep up with it.”
―
Leo Tolstoy
“The strongest of all warriors are these two — Time and Patience.”
―
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
