“The most difficult subjects can be explained to the most slow-witted man if he has not formed any idea of them already; but the simplest thing cannot be made clear to the most intelligent man if he is firmly persuaded that he knows already, without a shadow of doubt, what is laid before him.”

Leo Tolstoy

“Like the majority of irreproachably virtuous women, wearying often of the monotony of a virtuous life, Dolly from a distance excused illicit love, and even envied it a little.

Leo Tolstoy

“wisdom needs no violence...As it is we have played at war – that’s what’s vile! We play at magnanimity and all that stuff. Such magnanimity and sensibility are like the magnanimity and sensibility of a lady who faints when she sees a calf being killed: she is so kindhearted that she can’t look at blood, but enjoys eating the calf served up with sauce...If there was none of this magnanimity in war, we should go to war only when it was worth while going to certain death, as it is now. Then there would not be war because Paul Ivanovich had offended Michael Ivanovich.”

Leo Tolstoy

“The animalism of the brute nature in man is disgusting,” he thought, “but as long as it remains in its naked form we observe it from the height of our spiritual life and despise it; and—whether one has fallen or resisted—one remains what one was before. But when that same animalism hides under a cloak of poetry and æsthetic feeling and demands our worship—then we are swallowed up by it completely and worship animalism, no longer distinguishing good from evil. Then it is awful!”

Leo Tolstoy

“When a man sees a dying animal, horror comes over him: that which he himself is, his essence, is obviously being annihilated before his eyes--is ceasing to be. But when the dying one is a person, and a beloved person, then, besides a sense of horror at the annihilation of life, there is a feeling of severance and a spiritual wound which, like a physical wound, sometimes kills and sometimes heals, but always hurts and fears any external, irritating touch.”

Leo Tolstoy

“Happiness is pleasure without regret”

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

“We are all brothers, and yet I live by receiving a salary for arraigning, judging and punishing a thief or a prostitute, whose existence is conditioned by the whole consumption of my life.

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

“She did worse than break the law, she broke the rules”

Leo Tolstoy

“You are all misleading one another, and are yourselves deceived. The sun does not go round the earth, but the earth goes round the sun, revolving as it goes, and turning towards the sun in the course of each twenty-four hours, not only Japan, and the Philippines, and Sumatra where we now are, but Africa, and Europe, and America, and many lands besides. The sun does not shine for some one mountain, or for some one island, or for some one sea, nor even for one earth alone, but for other planets as well as our earth. If you would only look up at the heavens, instead of at the ground beneath your own feet, you might all understand this, and would then no longer suppose that the sun shines for you, or for your country alone.”

Leo Tolstoy

“There was no solution, save that universal solution which life gives to all questions, even the most complex and insolvable: One must live in the needs of the day--that is, forget oneself.”

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

“The most important acts, both for the one who accomplishes them and for his fellow creatures, are those that have remote consequences.”

Leo Tolstoy

“I shall go on in the same way, losing my temper...there will be still the same wall between the holy of holies of my soul and other people...but my life now, my whole life apart from anything that can happen to me, every minute of it is no more meaningless, as it was before, but it has the positive meaning of goodness, which I have the power to put into it.”

Leo Tolstoy


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