“He felt himself, and did not want to be anyone else. All he wanted now was to be better
than before.”
―
Leo Tolstoy
“The assertion that you are in falsehood and I am in truth ist the most cruel thing one man
can say to another”
―
Leo Tolstoy
“Everything I know...I know because I love.”
―
Leo Tolstoy
“Each time of life has its own kind of love.”
―
Leo Tolstoy
“There lay between them, separating them, that same terrible line of the unknown and of
fear, like the line separating the living from the dead.”
―
Leo Tolstoy
“Ah, if everyone was as sensitive as you! There's no girl who hasn't gone through that. And
it's all so unimportant!”
―
Leo Tolstoy
“Life is too long to say anything definitely; always say perhaps.”
―
Leo Tolstoy
“Lord have mercy! Pardon and help us!" he repeated the words that suddenly and
unexpectedly sprang to his lips. And he, an unbeliever, repeated those words not with his lips
only. At that instant he knew that neither his doubts nor the impossibility of believing with his
reason- of which he was conscious- all prevented his appealing to God. It all flew off like dust.
To whom should he appeal, if not to Him in whose hands he felt himself, his soul, and his love,
to be?
―
Leo Tolstoy
“Talent is the capacity to direct concentrated attention upon the subject: "the gift of seeing
what others have not seen.”
―
Leo Tolstoy
“Nothing but ambition, nothing but the desire to get on, that's all there is in his soul," she
thought; "as for these lofty ideals, love of culture, religion, they are only so many tools for
getting on.”
―
Leo Tolstoy
“Everyone wants to change humanity, but no one is willing to change themselves.”
―
Leo Tolstoy
“Society in itself is no great harm, but unsatisfied social aspirations are a bad and ugly
business. We must certainly accept, and we will.”
―
Leo Tolstoy
“What a strange illusion it is to suppose that beauty is goodness.
―
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
“In order to forgive, one must have lived through what I have lived through, and may God
spare her that.”
―
Leo Tolstoy