“With all my soul I longed to be in a position to join with the people in performing the rites of
their faith, but I could not do it. I felt that I would be lying to myself, mocking what was sacred
to me, if I were to go through with it.”
―
Leo Tolstoy
“Wrong does not cease to be wrong because the majority share in it.”
―
Leo Tolstoy
“But a man’s relationship to the world is determined not just by his intellect but by his
feelings and by his who aggregate of spiritual forces. However much one implies or explains to
a person that all that truly exists is no more than an idea, or that everything is made up of
atoms, or that the essence of life is substance or will, or that heat, light, movement and
electricity are only manifestations of one and the same energy; however much you explain this
to a man—a being who feels, suffers, rejoices, fears and hopes—it will not explain his place in
the universe.”
―
Leo Tolstoy
“What is to be done? There was no solution, but the universal solution which life gives to all
questions, even the most complex and insoluble. The answer is: one must live in the needs of
the day -- that is, forget oneself.”
―
Leo Tolstoy
“Smiling with pleasure, they went through their memories, not sad, old people's memories,
but poetic, youthful ones, those impressions from the very distant past where dream merges
with reality, and they laughed softly, rejoicing at something.”
―
Leo Tolstoy
“Only during a period of war does it become obvious how millions of people can be
manipulated. People, millions of people, are filled with pride while doing things which those
same people actually consider stupid, evil, dangerous, painful, and criminal, and they strongly
criticize these things—but continue doing them.”
―
Leo Tolstoy
“There are such repulsive faces in the world.”
―
Leo Tolstoy
“One might murder and steal and yet be happy”
―
Leo Tolstoy
“There it is!' he thought with rapture. 'When I was already in despair, and when it seemed
there would be no end- there it is! She loves me. She's confessed it.”
―
Leo Tolstoy
“To speak of it would be giving importance to something that has none.”
―
Leo Tolstoy
“Music makes me forget myself, my real position; it transports me to some other position
not my own. Under the influence of music it seems to me that I feel what I do not really feel,
that I understand what I do not understand, that I can do what I cannot do. I explain it by the
fact that music acts like yawning, like laughter: I am not sleepy, but I yawn when I see
someone yawning; there is nothing for me to laugh at, but I laugh when I hear people
laughing.
Music carries me immediately and directly into the mental condition in which the man was who
composed it. My soul merges with his and together with him I pass from one condition into
another, but why this happens I don't know.”
―
Leo Tolstoy
“He was not thinking that the Christian law which he had wanted to follow all his life
prescribed that he forgive and love his enemies; but the joyful feeling of love and forgiveness
of his enemies filled his soul.
―
Leo Tolstoy
“The combination of causes of phenomena is beyond the grasp of the human intellect. But
the impulse to seek causes is innate in the soul of man. And the human intellect, with no
inkling of the immense variety and complexity of circumstances conditioning a phenomenon,
any one of which may be separately conceived of as the cause of it, snatches at the first and
most easily understood approximation, and says here is the cause.”
―
Leo Tolstoy
“I am not strange but I feel queer. I am like that sometimes. I feel like crying all the time. It is
very silly but it will pass.
―
Leo Tolstoy
“There is no greatness where there is not simplicity, goodness, and truth.”
―
Leo Tolstoy
