“Energy rests upon love; and come as it will, there's no forcing it.”
―
Leo Tolstoy
“Every reform by violence is to be deprecated, because it does little to correct the evil while
men remain as they are, and because wisdom has no need of violence.”
―
Leo Tolstoy
“Formerly...when he tried to do anything for the good of everybody, for humanity...for the
whole village, he had noticed that the thoughts of it were agreeable, but the activity itself was
always unsatisfactory; there was no full assurance that the work was really necessary, and the
activity itself, which at first seemed so great, ever lessened and lessened till it vanished. But
now...when he began to confine himself more and more to living for himself, though he no
longer felt any joy at the thought of his activity, he felt confident that his work was necessary,
saw that it progressed far better than formerly, and that it was always growing more and
more.”
―
Leo Tolstoy
“There was no solution but that usual solution which life gives to all questions, even the
most complex and insoluble. That answer one must live in the needs of one that - that is,
forget oneself.”
―
Leo Tolstoy
“The rivalry of the European states in constantly increasing their forces has reduced them
to the necessity of having recourse to universal military service, since by that means the
greatest possible number of soldiers is obtained at the least possible expense. Germany first
hit on this device. And directly one state adopted it the others were obliged to do the same.
And by this means all citizens are under arms to support the iniquities practiced upon them; allcitizens have become their own oppressors.”
―
Leo Tolstoy
“He could not be mistaken. There were no other eyes like those in the world. There was
only one creature in the world who could concentrate for him all the brightness and meaning of
life. It was she. It was Kitty.”
―
Leo Tolstoy
“Anna spoke not only naturally and intelligently, but intelligently and casually, without
attaching any value to her own thoughts, yet giving great value to the thoughts of the one she
was talking to.”
―
Leo Tolstoy
“Count Lev Nikolayevich Tolstoy, commonly referred to in English as Leo Tolstoy, was a
Russian novelist, writer, essayist, philosopher, Christian anarchist, pacifist, educational
reformer, moral thinker, and an influential member of the Tolstoy family. As a fiction writer
Tolstoy is widely regarded as one of the greatest of all novelists, particularly noted for his
masterpieces War and Peace and Anna Karenina; in their scope, breadth and realistic
depiction of Russian life, the two books stand at the peak of realistic fiction. As a moral
philosopher he was notable for his ideas on nonviolent resistance through his work The
Kingdom of God is Within You, which in turn influenced such twentieth-century figures as
Mohandas K. Gandhi and Martin Luther King, Jr. Source: Wikipedia”
―
Leo Tolstoy
“no disease suffered by a live man can be known, for every living person has his own
peculiarities and always has his own peculiar, personal, novel, complicated disease, unknown
to medicine -- not a disease of the lungs, liver, skin, heart, nerves, and so on mentioned in
medical books, but a disease consisting of one of the innumerable combinations of the
maladies of those organs. This simple thought could not occur to the doctors (as it cannot
occur to a wizard that he is unable to work his charms) because the business of their lives was
to cure, and they received money for it and had spent the best years of their lives on that
business. But above all that thought was kept out of their minds by the fact that they saw they
were really useful [...] Their usefulness did not depend on making the patient swallow
substances for the most part harmful (the harm was scarcely perceptible because they were
given in small doses) but they were useful, necessary, and indispensable because they
satisfied a mental need of the invalid and those who loved her -- and that is why there are, and
always will be, pseudo-healers, wise women, homoeopaths, and allopaths. They satisfied that
eternal human need for hope of relief, for sympathy, and that something should be done,
which is felt by those who are suffering.”
―
Leo Tolstoy
“The more mental effort he made the clearer he saw that it was undoubtedly so: that he had
really forgotten and overlooked one little circumstance in life - that Death would come and end
everything, so that it was useless to begin anything, and that there was no help for it, Yes it
was terrible but true”
―
Leo Tolstoy
“The heroine of my writings is She, whom I love with all the forces of my being, She who
always was, is and will be beautiful, is Truth
―
Leo Tolstoy
“You are all misleading one another, and are yourselves deceived. The sun does not go
round the earth, but the earth goes round the sun, revolving as it goes, and turning towards
the sun in the course of each twenty-four hours, not only Japan, and the Philippines, and
Sumatra where we now are, but Africa, and Europe, and America, and many lands besides.
The sun does not shine for some one mountain, or for some one island, or for some one sea,
nor even for one earth alone, but for other planets as well as our earth. If you would only look
up at the heavens, instead of at the ground beneath your own feet, you might all understand
this, and would then no longer suppose that the sun shines for you, or for your country alone.”
―
Leo Tolstoy
“Without the support from religion--remember, we talked about it--no father, using only his
own resources, would be able to bring up a child.”
―
Leo Tolstoy
“I want movement, not a calm course of existence. I want excitement and danger and the
chance to sacrifice myself for my love. I feel in myself a superabundance of energy which finds
no outlet in our quiet life.”
―
Leo Tolstoy
“Don’t you know that you are all my life to me? ...But peace I do not know, and can’t give to
you. My whole being, my love...yes! I cannot think about you and about myself separately. You
and I are one to me. And I do not see before us the possibility of peace either for me or for
you. I see the possibility of despair, misfortune...or of happiness-what happiness!...Is it
impossible?"
―
Leo Tolstoy
