“Man lives consciously for himself, but is an unconscious instrument in the attainment of the
historic, universal aims of humanity.
―
Leo Tolstoy
“Then we should find some artificial inoculation against love, as with smallpox. ”
―
Leo Tolstoy
“All the variety, all the charm, all the beauty of life are made up of light and shade.”
―
Leo Tolstoy
“Human science fragments everything in order to understand it, kills everything in order to
examine it. ”
―
Leo Tolstoy
“Universal military service may be compared to the efforts of a man to prop up his falling
house who so surrounds it and fills it with props and buttresses and planks and scaffolding
that he manages to keep the house standing only by making it impossible to live in it.”
―
Leo Tolstoy
“To tell the truth is very difficult, and young people are rarely capable of it.”
―
Leo Tolstoy
“What's all this love of arguing? No one ever convinces anyone else.”
―
Leo Tolstoy
“There are no conditions to which a person cannot grow accustomed, especially if he sees that
everyone around him lives in the same way.”
―
Leo Tolstoy
“In the name of God, stop a moment, cease your work, look around you.”
―
Leo Tolstoy
“• A man in motion always devises an aim for that motion. To be able to go a thousand
miles he must imagine that something good awaits him at the end of those thousand miles.
One must have the prospect of a promised land to have the strength to move.”
―
Leo Tolstoy
“Without knowing what I am and why I am here, life is impossible.”
―
Leo Tolstoy
“Yes, it is very likely that I shall be killed tomorrow,’ he thought. And suddenly at this
thought of death a whole series of most distant, most intimate, memories rose in his
imagination: he remembered his last parting from his father and his wife; he remembered the
days when he first loved her. He thought of her pregnancy and felt sorry for her and for
himself, and in a nervously emotional and softened mood he went out of the hut in which he
was billeted with Nesvitsky and began to walk up and down before it.”
―
Leo Tolstoy
“Many people have ideas on how others should change; few people have ideas on how
they should change. ”
―
Leo Tolstoy
“nothing has contributed so much to the obscuring of Christian truth in the eyes of the
heathen, and has hindered so much the diffusion of Christianity through the world, as the
disregard of [non-resistance] by men calling themselves Christians, and the permission of war
and violence to Christians.
―
Leo Tolstoy