“The very nastiest and coarsest, I can't tell you. It is not grief, not dullness, but much worse.
It is as if all that was good in me had hidden itself, and only what is horrid remains.
―
Leo Tolstoy
“Everything that I Know, I Know Only Because I Love...”
―
Leo Tolstoy
“Love is life. All, everything that I understand, I understand only because I love. Everything is,
everything exists, only 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.”
―
Leo Tolstoy
“Every man and every living creature has a sacred right to the gladness of springtime.”
―
Leo Tolstoy
“Many people have ideas on how others should change; few people have ideas on how
they should change. ”
―
Leo Tolstoy
“But that had been grief--this was joy. Yet that grief and this joy were alike outside all the
ordinary conditions of life; they were loopholes, as it were, in that ordinary life through which
there came glimpses of something sublime. And in the contemplation of this sublime
something the soul was exalted to inconceivable heights of which it had before had no
conception, while reason lagged behind, unable to keep up with it.”
―
Leo Tolstoy
“Government is an association of men who do violence to the rest of us.”
―
Leo Tolstoy
“He was in a fairy kingdom where everything was possible.
He looked up at the sky. And the sky was a fairy realm like the earth. It was clearing, and over
the tops of the trees clouds were swiftly sailing as if unveiling the stars.”
―
Leo Tolstoy
“The worker picked up Pakhom’s spade, dug a grave, and buried him - six feet from head to
heel, exactly the amount of land a man needs.”
―
Leo Tolstoy
“Every man had his personal habits, passions, and impulses toward goodness, beauty, and
truth.”
―
Leo Tolstoy
“[Pierre] involuntarily started comparing these two men, so different and at the same time
so similar, because of the love he had for both of them, and because both had lived and both
had died.”
―
Leo Tolstoy
“Speransky, either because he appreciated Prince Andrey's abilities or because he thought
it as well to secure his adherence, showed off his calm, impartial sagacity before Prince
Andrey, and flattered him with that delicate flattery that goes hand in hand with conceit, and
consists in a tacit assumption that one's companion and oneself are the only people capable
of understanding all the folly of the rest of the world and the sagacity and profundity of their
own ideas.”
―
Leo Tolstoy
“it is hard for anyone who is dissatisfied not to blame some one else, and especially the
person nearest of all to him, for the ground of his dissatisfaction.”
―
Leo Tolstoy
“I often think that men don't understand what is noble and what is ignorant, though they always
talk about it.”
―
Leo Tolstoy
“nothing has contributed so much to the obscuring of Christian truth in the eyes of the
heathen, and has hindered so much the diffusion of Christianity through the world, as the
disregard of [non-resistance] by men calling themselves Christians, and the permission of war
and violence to Christians.
―
Leo Tolstoy
