“Our body is a machine for living. It is organized for that, it is its nature. Let life go on in it
unhindered and let it defend itself.”
―
Leo Tolstoy
“One can live magnificently in this world if one knows how to work and how to love.”
―
Leo Tolstoy
“When you love someone, you love the person as they are, and not as you'd like them to be.”
―
Leo Tolstoy
“Not in order to justify, but simply in order to explain my lack of consistency, I say: Look at
my present life and then at my former life, and you will see that I do attempt to carry them out.
It is true that I have not fulfilled one thousandth part of them [Christian precepts], and I am
ashamed of this, but I have failed to fulfill them not because I did not wish to, but because I
was unable to. Teach me how to escape from the net of temptations that surrounds me, help
me and I will fulfill them; even without help I wish and hope to fulfill them.
―
Leo Tolstoy
“At that moment it meant nothing to him who might be standing over him, or what was said
of him; he was only glad that people were standing near him and only wished that they would
help him and bring him back to life, which seemed to him so beautiful now that he had today
learned to understand it so differently.”
―
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
“We can know only that we know nothing. And that is the highest degree of human wisdom.”
―
Leo Tolstoy
“I wanted to run after him, but remembered that it is ridiculous to run after one's wife's lover
in one's socks; and I did not wish to be ridiculous but terrible.”
―
Leo Tolstoy
“But perhaps it is always so, that men form their conceptions from fictitious, conventional
types, and then—all the combinations made—they are tired of the fictitious figures and begin
to invent more natural, true figures.”
―
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
“Mathematics is the queen of disciplines.... it will drive the nonsense out of your head!”
―
Leo Tolstoy
“the same question arose in every soul: "For what, for whom, must I kill and be killed?"
―
Leo Tolstoy
“We shall all of us die, so why should I grudge a little trouble?”
―
Leo Tolstoy
“We are conscious of the force of man's life, and we call it freedom”
―
Leo Tolstoy
