“Here's my advice to you: don't marry until you can tell yourself that you've done all you could,
and until you've stopped loving the women you've chosen, until you see her clearly, otherwise
you'll be cruelly and irremediably mistaken. Marry when you're old and good for nothing...
Otherwise all that's good and lofty in you will be lost.”
―
Leo Tolstoy
“The higher a man stands on the social ladder, the greater the number of people he is
connected with, the more power he has over other people, the more obvious is the
predestination and inevitability of his every action.”
―
Leo Tolstoy
“Another's wife is a white swan, and ours is bitter wormwood.”
―
Leo Tolstoy
“But a man’s relationship to the world is determined not just by his intellect but by his
feelings and by his who aggregate of spiritual forces. However much one implies or explains to
a person that all that truly exists is no more than an idea, or that everything is made up of
atoms, or that the essence of life is substance or will, or that heat, light, movement and
electricity are only manifestations of one and the same energy; however much you explain this
to a man—a being who feels, suffers, rejoices, fears and hopes—it will not explain his place in
the universe.”
―
Leo Tolstoy
“There are such repulsive faces in the world.”
―
Leo Tolstoy
“vegetarianism is the taproot of humanitarianism.”
―
Leo Tolstoy
“I think...if so many men, so many minds, certainly so many hearts, so many kinds of love.”
―
Leo Tolstoy
“Does it ever happen to you," Natasha said to her brother, when they had settled in the
sitting room, "does it ever happen to you that you feel there's nothing more - nothing; that
everything good has already happened? And it's not really boring, but sad?"
"As if it doesn't!" he said. "It's happened to me that everything's fine, everybody's merry, and it
suddenly comes into my head that it's all tiresome and we all ought to die....”
―
Leo Tolstoy
“If everyone fought only for his own convictions, there would be no wars.”
―
Leo Tolstoy
“I wanted to run after him, but remembered that it is ridiculous to run after one's wife's lover
in one's socks; and I did not wish to be ridiculous but terrible.”
―
Leo Tolstoy
“Pierre looked into the sky, into the depths of the retreating, twinkling stars. "And all this is
mine, and all this is in me, and all this is me!" thought Pierre. "And all this they've caught and
put in a shed and boarded it up!”
―
Leo Tolstoy
“Instead of going to Paris to attend lectures, go to the public library, and you won't come out
for twenty years, if you really wish to learn.”
―
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
“She was in that highly-wrought state when the reasoning powers act with great rapidity: the
state a man is in before a battle or a struggle, in danger, and at the decisive moments of life -
those moments when a man shows once and for all what he is worth, that his past was not
lived in vain but was a preparation for these moments.”
―
Leo Tolstoy
