“Just as a painter needs light in order to put the finishing touches to his picture, so I need an inner light, which I feel I never have enough of in the autumn.”

Leo Tolstoy

“Self-conceit is a sentiment entirely incompatible with genuine sorrow, and it is so firmly engrafted on human nature that even the most profound sorrow can seldom expel it altogether. Vanity in sorrow expresses itself by a desire to appear either stricken with grief or unhappy or brave: and this ignoble desire which we do not acknowledge but which hardly ever leaves us even in the deepest trouble robs our grief of its strength, dignity and sincerity.”

Leo Tolstoy

“When an apple has ripened and falls, why does it fall? Because of its attraction to the earth, because its stalk withers, because it is dried by the sun, because it grows heavier, because the wind shakes it, or because the boy standing below wants to eat it?”

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

“Just when the question of how to live had become clearer to him, a new insoluble problem presented itself - Death.”

Leo Tolstoy

“A writer is dear and necessary for us only in the measure of which he reveals to us the inner workings of his very soul.”

Leo Tolstoy

Now, however, he had learned to see the great, the eternal, the infinite in everything, and therefore, in order to look at it, to enjoy his contemplation of it, he naturally discarded teh telescope through which he had till then been gazing over the heads of men, and joyfully surveyed the ever-changeing, eternally great, unfathomable, and infinite life around him. And the closer he looked, the happier and more seren he was. The awful question: What for? a simple answer was now always ready in his soul: Because there is a God, that God without whose will not one hair of a man's head falls.”

Leo Tolstoy

“When politics and home life have become one and the same thing, [...] then,[...] it is evident that we will be in a state of total liberty or anarchy.”

Leo Tolstoy

“Each man lives for himself, uses his freedom to achieve his personal goals, and feels with his whole being that right now he can or cannot do such-and-such an action; but as soon as he does it, this action, committed at a certain moment in time, becomes irreversible, and makes itself the property of history, in which is has not a free but a predestined significance. ”

Leo Tolstoy

Those two drops of honey, which more than all else had diverted my eyes from the cruel truth, my love for my family and for my writing, which I called art – I no longer found sweet.

Leo Tolstoy

“Man must not check reason by tradition, but contrariwise, must check tradition by reason.”

Leo Tolstoy

“What's all this love of arguing? No one ever convinces anyone else.”

Leo Tolstoy

“The social conditions of life can only be improved by people exercising self-restraint.”

Leo Tolstoy

“You're not going to be different ... you're going to be the same as you've always been; with doubts, everlasting dissatisfaction with yourself, vain efforts to amend, and falls, and everlasting expectation, of a happiness which you won't get, and which isn't possible for you.”

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


Contact Us


Send us a mail and we will get in touch with you soon!

You can email us at: contact@fancyread.com
Fancyread Inc.