“the same question arose in every soul: "For what, for whom, must I kill and be killed?"
―
Leo Tolstoy
“We expect rewards for goodness, and punishments for the bad things which we do. Often,
they are not immediately”
―
Leo Tolstoy
“In the name of God, stop a moment, cease your work, look around you.”
―
Leo Tolstoy
“A wound in the soul, coming from the rending of the spiritual body, strange as it may seem,
gradually closes like a physical wound. And once a deep wound heals over and the edges
seem to have knit, a wound in the soul, like a physical wound, can be healed only by the force
of life pushing up from inside.This was the way Natasha's wound healed. She thought her life was over. But suddenly her
love for her mother showed her that the essence of life - love - was still alive in her. Love
awoke, and life awoke.”
―
Leo Tolstoy
“But every acquisition that is disproportionate to the labor spent on it is dishonest.”
―
Leo Tolstoy
“In order to understand, observe, deduce, man must first be conscious of himself as alive
―
Leo Tolstoy
“Why nowadays there's a new fashion every day.”
―
Leo Tolstoy
“All, everything that I understand, I understand only because I love.”
―
Leo Tolstoy
“All great literature is one of two stories; a man goes on a journey or a stranger comes to
town.”
―
Leo Tolstoy
“Natasha was happy as she had never been in her life. She was at that highest pitch of
happiness, when one becomes completely good and kind, and disbelieves in the very
possibility of evil, unhappiness, and sorrow.”
―
Leo Tolstoy
“As long as he followed the fixed definition of obscure words such as spirit, will, freedom,
essence, purposely letting himself go into the snare of words the philosophers set for him, he
seemed to comprehend something. But he had only to forget the artificial train of reasoning,
and to turn from life itself to what had satisfied him while thinking in accordance with the fixed
definitions, and all this artificial edifice fell to pieces at once like a house of cards, and it
became clear that the edifice had been built up out of those transposed words, apart from
anything in life more important than reason.”
―
Leo Tolstoy
“It was as if the main screw in his head, which held his whole life together, had become
stripped. The screw would not go in, would not come out, but turned in the same groove
without catching hold, and it was impossible to stop turning it.”
―
Leo Tolstoy
“Yes, there is something in me hateful, repulsive," thought Ljewin, as he came away from
the Schtscherbazkijs', and walked in the direction of his brother's lodgings. "And I don't get on
with other people. Pride, they say. No, I have no pride. If I had any pride, I should not have put
myself in such a position"
―
Leo Tolstoy
“When one's head is gone one doesn't weep over one's hair!”
―
Leo Tolstoy
