“I wrote everything into Anna Karenina, and nothing was left over.”
―
Leo Tolstoy
“Everything was made bright by her. She was the smile that shed light all around her.”
―
Leo Tolstoy
“Mathematics is the queen of disciplines.... it will drive the nonsense out of your head!”
―
Leo Tolstoy
“It's different for you and me. You study, you become enlightened; I study, I become
confused.”
―
Leo Tolstoy
“I wanted movement and not a calm course of existence. I wanted excitement and danger and
the chance to sacrifice myself for my love.”
―
Leo Tolstoy
“Looking into Napoleon's eyes, Prince Andrei thought about the insignificance of grandeur,
about the insignificance of life, the meaning of which no one could understand, and about the
still greater insignificance of death, the meaning of which no one among the living could
understand or explain.”
―
Leo Tolstoy
“Faith is neither hope nor trust, but a particular spiritual state. Faith is man’s awareness that
his position in the world obliges him to perform certain actions. A person acts according to his
faith, not as the catechism says because he believes in things unseen as in things seen, nor
because he wishes to achieve things hoped for, but simply because having defined his
position in the world it is natural for him to act according to it.”
―
Leo Tolstoy
“The goal of the artist is not to solve a question irrefutably, but to force people to love life in
all its countless, inexhaustible manifestations.”
―
Leo Tolstoy
“Only by taking infinitesimally small units for observation (the differential of history, that is,
the individual tendencies of men) and attaining to the art of integrating them (that is, finding
the sum of these infinitesimals) can we hope to arrive at the laws of history.”
―
Leo Tolstoy
“was serene. Her Moscow troubles had become a memory to her.”
―
Leo Tolstoy
“The story of Ivan Ilyich life was of the simplest, most ordinary and therefore most terrible".
Tolstoy defines living an ordinary life as terrible - I really do have to agree!”
―
Leo Tolstoy
“I can never forget what is my whole life.”
―
Leo Tolstoy
“When one's head is gone one doesn't weep over one's hair!”
―
Leo Tolstoy
Pure, perfect sorrow is as impossible as pure and perfect joy.”
―
Leo Tolstoy
