“Oh no, Papa, Kitty objected warmly. Varenka adores her. And besides, she does so much
good! Ask anyone you like! Everybody knows her and Aline Stah. Perhaps, he said, pressing
her arm with his elbow. But it is better to do good so that, ask whom you will, no one knows
anything about it.”
―
Leo Tolstoy
“When you understand that you will die to-morrow, if not to-day, and nothing will be left,
then everything is so unimportant!... So one goes on living, amusing oneself with hunting, with
work - anything so as not think of death”
―
Leo Tolstoy
“Higher and higher receded the sky, wider and wider spread the streak of dawn, whiter
grew the pallid silver of the dew, more lifeless the sickle of the moon...”
―
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
“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
“What energy!' I thought. 'Man has conquered everything, and destroyed millions of plants,
yet this one won't submit.”
―
Leo Tolstoy
“Happiness is an allegory, unhappiness a story.”
―
Leo Tolstoy
“Sight-seeing, aside from the fact that everything had been seen already, could not have for
him--and intelligent Russian--the inexplicable importance attached to it by the English.”
―
Leo Tolstoy
“You need feeling, emotion, to create. You can't create out of indifference.”
―
Leo Tolstoy
“But the law of loving others could not be discovered by reason, because it is unreasonable.”
―
Leo Tolstoy
“Everything seemed pleasant and easy to Nikolai during the first part of his stay in
Voronezh and, as generally happens when a man is in a pleasant state of mind, everything
went well and easily.”
―
Leo Tolstoy
“That which constitutes the cause of the economic poverty of our age is what the English
call over-production (which means that a mass of things are made which are of no use to
anybody, and with which nothing can be done).”
―
Leo Tolstoy
“The antagonism between life and conscience may be removed in two ways: by a change
of life or by a change of conscience.”
―
Leo Tolstoy
“Wrong does not cease to be wrong because the majority share in it.”
―
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
