“Pierre’s heart thrilled to these words as he gazed with shining eyes into the mason’s face. He listened without interrupting or asking any questions, and with all his soul he believed what this stranger was saying to him. Whether he was believing rational arguments coming from the mason, or trusting more like a child in the persuasive intonation, the sense of authority, the sincerity of the words spoken, the quavering voice that sometimes seemed on the verge of breaking down, or the gleaming aged eyes grown old in that conviction, or the tranquillity, the certainty and true sense of vocation radiating from the old man’s whole being and striking Pierre very forcibly, given the state of his own debasement and despair – whatever was happening to him, he longed to believe with all his soul, and he did believe and he felt a joyful sense of calm, renewal and return to life.”

Leo Tolstoy

“In actuality, it was like the homes of all people who are not really rich but who want to look rich, and therefore end up looking like one another: it had damasks, ebony, plants, carpets, and bronzes, everything dark and gleaming—all the effects a certain class of people produce so as to look like people of a certain class. And his place looked so much like the others that it would never have been noticed, though it all seemed quite exceptional to him.”

Leo Tolstoy

“Whatever our fate is or may be, we have made it and do not complain of it."

Leo Tolstoy

“Here I am alive, and it's not my fault, so I have to try and get by as best I can without hurting anybody until death takes over.”

Leo Tolstoy

“Quos vilt perdere dementat' Whome the gods wish to destroy, they first drive made (Latin).”

Leo Tolstoy

“He wanted and needed their love, but felt none towards them. He now had neither love nor humility nor purity”

Leo Tolstoy

“I was wrong when I said that I did not regret the past. I do regret it; I weep for the past love which can never return. Who is to blame, I do not know. Love remains, but not the old love; its place remains, but it is all wasted away and has lost all strength and substance; recollections are still left, and gratitude; but...”

Leo Tolstoy

“The march of humanity, springing as it does from an infinite multitude of individual wills, is continuous.”

Leo Tolstoy

“A battle is won by the side that is absolutely determined to win. Why did we lose the battle of Austerlitz? Our casualties were about the same as those of the French, but we had told ourselves early in the day that the battle was lost, so it was lost.

Leo Tolstoy

“Art is not, as the metaphysicians say, the manifestation of some mysterious idea of beauty or God; it is not, as the aesthetical physiologists say, a game in which man lets off his excess of stored-up energy; it is not the expression of man's emotions by external signs; it is not the production of pleasing objects; and, above all, it is not pleasure; but it is a means of union among men, joining them together in the same feelings, and indispensable for the life and progress toward well-being of individuals and of humanity.”

Leo Tolstoy

“True religion is that relationship, in accordance with reason and knowledge which man establishes with the infinite world around him, and which binds his life to that infinity and guides his actions.”

Leo Tolstoy

“The shore was God, the stream was tradition, and the oars were the free will given to me to make it to the shore where I would be joined with God. Thus the force of life was renewed within me, and I began to live once again.”

Leo Tolstoy

“Love hinders death. Love is life. All, everything that I understand, I understand because I love. Everything is united by it alone. Love is God, and to die means that I, a particle of love, shall return to the general and eternal source." These thoughts seemed to him comforting. But they were only thoughts. Something was lacking in them, they were not clear, they were too one-sidedly personal and brain-spun. And there was the former agitation and obscurity.”

Leo Tolstoy

“no disease suffered by a live man can be known, for every living person has his own peculiarities and always has his own peculiar, personal, novel, complicated disease, unknown to medicine -- not a disease of the lungs, liver, skin, heart, nerves, and so on mentioned in medical books, but a disease consisting of one of the innumerable combinations of the maladies of those organs. This simple thought could not occur to the doctors (as it cannot occur to a wizard that he is unable to work his charms) because the business of their lives was to cure, and they received money for it and had spent the best years of their lives on that business. But above all that thought was kept out of their minds by the fact that they saw they were really useful [...] Their usefulness did not depend on making the patient swallow substances for the most part harmful (the harm was scarcely perceptible because they were given in small doses) but they were useful, necessary, and indispensable because they satisfied a mental need of the invalid and those who loved her -- and that is why there are, and always will be, pseudo-healers, wise women, homoeopaths, and allopaths. They satisfied that eternal human need for hope of relief, for sympathy, and that something should be done, which is felt by those who are suffering.”

Leo Tolstoy

“I ask one thing: I ask the right to hope and suffer as I do now."

Leo Tolstoy


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