“If everyone fought for their own convictions there would be no war.
―
Leo Tolstoy
“In order not to give myself up to the desire to kill him on the spot, I felt compelled to treat
him cordially.”
―
Leo Tolstoy
“Happiness consists in always aspiring perfection, the pause in any level in perfection is the
pause of happiness”
―
Leo Tolstoy
“I did not myself know what I wanted: I feared life, desired to escape from it, yet still hoped
something of it.”
―
Leo Tolstoy
“How strange, extraordinary, and joyful it was to her to think that her son - the little son,
whose tiny limbs had faintly stirred within her twenty years ago, for whose sake she had so
often quarreled with the count, who would spoil him, the little son, who had first learnt to say
grusha, and then had learnt to say baba - that that son was now in a foreign land, in strange
surroundings, a manly warrior, alone without help or guidance, doing there his proper manly
work. All the world-wide experience of ages, proving that children do imperceptibly from the
cradle grow up into men, did not exist for the countess. The growth of her son had been for
her at every strage of his growth just as extraordinary as though millions of millions of men
had not grown up in the same way. Just as, twenty years before, she could not believe that the
little creature that was lying somewhere under her heart, would one day cry and learn to talk,
now she could not believe that the same little creature could be that strong, brave man, that
paragon of sons and of men that, judging by this letter, he was now.”
―
Leo Tolstoy
“And however much the princess was assured that in our time young people themselves
must settle their fate, she was unable to believe it, as she would have been unable to believe
that in anyone's time the best toys for five-year-old children would be loaded pistols.”
―
Leo Tolstoy
“I simply want to live; to cause no evil to anyone but myself.”
―
Leo Tolstoy
“If so many men, so many minds, certainly so many hearts, so many kinds of love.”
―
Leo Tolstoy
“Man must not check reason by tradition, but contrariwise, must check tradition by reason.”
―
Leo Tolstoy
“We are forced to fall back on fatalism as an explanation of irrational events (that is to say,
events the reasonableness of which we do not understand).”
―
Leo Tolstoy
“He wanted and needed their love, but felt none towards them. He now had neither love nor
humility nor purity”
―
Leo Tolstoy
“But the older he grew and the more intimately he came to know his brother, the oftener the
thought occurred to him that the power of working for the general welfare – a power of whichhe felt himself entirely destitute – was not a virtue but rather a lack of something: not a lack of
kindly honesty and noble desires and tastes, but a lack of the power of living, of what is called
heart – the aspiration which makes a man choose one out of all the innumerable paths of life
that present themselves, and desire that alone.”
―
Leo Tolstoy
“Love. The reason I dislike that word is that it means too much for me, far more than you can
understand."
―
Leo Tolstoy
“All, everything that I understand, I understand only because I love.”
―
Leo Tolstoy
