“If a man aspires to a righteous life, his first act of abstinence if from injury to animals.”
―
Leo Tolstoy
“If you love me as you say you do,' she whispered, 'make it so that I am at peace.”
―
Leo Tolstoy
“Napoleon, the man of genius, did this! But to say that he destroyed his army because he
wished to, or because he was very stupid, would be as unjust as to say that he had brought
his troops to Moscow because he wished to and because he was very clever and a genius”
―
Leo Tolstoy
“What I think about vivisection is that if people admit that they have the right to take or
endanger the life of living beings for the benefit of many, there will be no limit to their cruelty.”
―
Leo Tolstoy
“The whole world is divided for me into two parts: one is she, and there is all happiness, hope,
light; the other is where she is not, and there is dejection and darkness...”
―
Leo Tolstoy
“All families are happy, all families are alike.”
―
Leo Tolstoy
“There was no solution, but that universal solution which life gives to all questions, even the
most complex and insoluble. That answer is: one must live in the needs of the day—that is,
forget oneself. To forget himself in sleep was impossible now, at least till nighttime; he could
not go back now to the music sung by the decanter-women; so he must forget himself in the
dream of daily life.”
―
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
“Anna Arkadyevna read and understood, but it was distasteful to her to read, that it, to
follow the reflection of other people's lives. She had too great a desire to live herself.”
―
Leo Tolstoy
“No matter what the work you are doing, be always ready to drop it. And plan it, so as to be
able to leave it.”
―
Leo Tolstoy
“In order to undertake anything in family life, it is necessary that there be either complete
discord between the spouses or loving harmony.”
―
Leo Tolstoy
“I think...if so many men, so many minds, certainly so many hearts, so many kinds of love.”
―
Leo Tolstoy
“Man cannot possess anything as long as he fears death. But to him who does not fear it,
everything belongs. If there was no suffering, man would not know his limits, would not know
himself.
―
Leo Tolstoy
“Though the doctors treated him, let his blood, and gave him medications to drink, he
nevertheless recovered.”
―
Leo Tolstoy