“Her motherly instinct told her that there was too much of something in Natasha, and that it would prevent her from being happy.”

Leo Tolstoy

“War is the most painful act of subjection to the laws of God that can be required of the human will.”

Leo Tolstoy

“All we can know is that we know nothing. And that's the height of human wisdom.”

Leo Tolstoy

“He felt himself, and did not want to be anyone else. All he wanted now was to be better than before.”

Leo Tolstoy

“It's like scarlet fever: one has to get it over." "Then one should invent a way of inoculating love, like vaccination.”

Leo Tolstoy

“Add your light to the sum of light.”

Leo Tolstoy

“If goodness has causes, it is not goodness; if it has effects, a reward, it is not goodness either. So goodness is outside the chain of cause and effect.”

Leo Tolstoy

“In actuality, it was like the homes of all people who are not really rich but who want to look rich, and therefore end up looking like one another: it had damasks, ebony, plants, carpets, and bronzes, everything dark and gleaming—all the effects a certain class of people produce so as to look like people of a certain class. And his place looked so much like the others that it would never have been noticed, though it all seemed quite exceptional to him.”

Leo Tolstoy

Many families remain for years in the same place, though both husband and wife are sick of it, simply because there is neither complete division nor agreement between them.”

Leo Tolstoy

“oh God! what am I to do if I love nothing but fame and men's esteem?”

Leo Tolstoy

“It's too easy to criticize a man when he's out of favour, and to make him shoulder the blame for everybody else's mistakes.”

Leo Tolstoy

“The doctrine of Christ, which teaches love, humility, and self-denial, had always attracted me. But I found a contrary law, both in the history of the past and in the present organization of our lives – a law repugnant to my heart, my conscience, and my reason, but one that flattered my animal instincts. I knew that if I accepted the doctrine of Christ, I should be forsaken, miserable, persecuted, and sorrowing, as Christ tells us His followers will be. I knew that if I accepted that law of man, I should have the approbation of my fellow-men; I should be at peace and in safety; all possible sophisms would be at hand to quiet my conscience and I should ‘laugh and be merry,’ as Christ says. I felt this, and therefore I avoided a closer examination of the law of Christ, and tried to comprehend it in a way that should not prevent my still leading my animal life. But, finding that impossible, I desisted from all attempts at comprehension.”

Leo Tolstoy

“All the stories and descriptions of that time without exception peak only of the patriotism, self-sacrifice, despair, grief, and heroism of the Russians. But in reality it was not like that...The majority of the people paid no attention to the general course of events but were influenced only by their immediate personal interests.”

Leo Tolstoy

“But that had been grief--this was joy. Yet that grief and this joy were alike outside all the ordinary conditions of life; they were loopholes, as it were, in that ordinary life through which there came glimpses of something sublime. And in the contemplation of this sublime something the soul was exalted to inconceivable heights of which it had before had no conception, while reason lagged behind, unable to keep up with it.”

Leo Tolstoy

“We do not love people so much for the good they have done us, as for the good we do them”

Leo Tolstoy


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