“He stepped down, avoiding any long look at her as one avoids long looks at the sun, but
seeing her as one sees the sun, without looking.”
―
Leo Tolstoy
“A man is never such an egotist as at moments of spiritual ecstasy. At such times it seems
to him that there is nothing on earth more splendid and interesting than himself.”
―
Leo Tolstoy
“The only thing that we know is that we know nothing, and that is the highest flight of human
wisdom.”
―
Leo Tolstoy
“The question of how things will settle down is the only important question...”
―
Leo Tolstoy
“Men never understand what honor is, though they're always talking about it”
―
Leo Tolstoy
“What is to be done? There was no solution, but the universal solution which life gives to all
questions, even the most complex and insoluble. The answer is: one must live in the needs of
the day -- that is, forget oneself.”
―
Leo Tolstoy
“Art should cause violence to be set aside and it is only art that can accomplish this.”
―
Leo Tolstoy
“But every acquisition that is disproportionate to the labor spent on it is dishonest.”
―
Leo Tolstoy
“But to us of a later generation...it is inconceivable that millions of Christian men should
have killed and tortured each other, because Napoleon was ambitious, Alexander firm, English
policy crafty, and the Duke of Oldenburg hardly treated. We cannot grasp the connections
between these circumstances and the bare fact of murder and violence, nor why the duke's
wrongs should induce thousands of men from the other side of Europe to pillage and murder
the inhabitants of the Smolensk and Moscow provinces and to be slaughtered by them.”
―
Leo Tolstoy
“Every violent reform deserves censure, for it quite fails to remedy evil while men remain
what they are, and also because wisdom needs no violence.”
―
Leo Tolstoy
“The simplest and shortest ethical precept is to be served as little as possible . . . and to
serve others as much as possible.”
―
Leo Tolstoy
“I'd rather end up wishing I hadn’t than end up wishing I had.”
―
Leo Tolstoy
“Here I am...wanting to accomplish something and completely forgetting it must all end--that
there is such a thing as death.”
―
Leo Tolstoy
“If we admit that human life can be ruled by reason, then all possibility of life is destroyed.”
―
Leo Tolstoy
