“Everything I know, I know because of love”
―
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
“Art is not a handicraft; it is the transmission of feeling the artist has experienced.
―
Leo Tolstoy
“Pierre was one of those people who are strong only when they feel themselves perfectly
pure.”
―
Leo Tolstoy
“With friends, one is well; but at home, one is better.”
―
Leo Tolstoy
“The difference between real material poison and intellectual poison is that most material
poison is disgusting to the taste, but intellectual poison, which takes the form of cheap
newspapers or bad books, can unfortunately sometimes be attractive.”
―
Leo Tolstoy
“We are conscious of the force of man's life, and we call it freedom”
―
Leo Tolstoy
“It's all God's will: you can die in your sleep, and God can spare you in battle.”
―
Leo Tolstoy
“What energy!' I thought. 'Man has conquered everything, and destroyed millions of plants,
yet this one won't submit.”
―
Leo Tolstoy
“If there is a God and future life, there is truth and good, and man's highest happiness
consists in striving to attain them. We must live, we must love, and we must believe that we
live not only today on this scrap of earth, but have lived and shall live”
―
Leo Tolstoy
“Consciously a man lives on his own account in freedom of willbut he serves as an
unconscious instrument in bringing about the historical ends of humanity. An act he has once
committed is irrecvocable, and that act of his, coinciding in time with millions of acts of others,
has an historical value... 'The hearts of kinds are in the hand of God.' The king is the slave of
history... Every action that seems to them an act of their own freewill, is in an historical sense
not free at all, but in bondage to the whole course of previous history, and predestined from all
eternity.”
―
Leo Tolstoy
“Just when the question of how to live had become clearer to him, a new insoluble problem
presented itself - Death.”
―
Leo Tolstoy
“He felt all the torment of his and her position, all the difficulties they were surrounded by in
consequence of their station in life, which exposed them to the eyes of the whole world,
obliged them to hide their love, to lie and deceive, and again to lie and deceive, to scheme and
constantly think about others while the passion that bound them was so strong that they both
forgot everything but their love.”
―
Leo Tolstoy
