“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
“When you love someone, you love the person as they are, and not as you'd like them to be.”
―
Leo Tolstoy
*"Splendid if I overcome My earthy passion, But if I succeed not, Still I have known
happiness!”
―
Leo Tolstoy
“There are no conditions to which a man cannot become used, especially if he sees that all
around him are living in the same way.”
―
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
“The assertion that you are in falsehood and I am in truth ist the most cruel thing one man
can say to another”
―
Leo Tolstoy
“The combination of causes of phenomena is beyond the grasp of the human intellect. But
the impulse to seek causes is innate in the soul of man. And the human intellect, with no
inkling of the immense variety and complexity of circumstances conditioning a phenomenon,
any one of which may be separately conceived of as the cause of it, snatches at the first and
most easily understood approximation, and says here is the cause.”
―
Leo Tolstoy
“Yes, there is something uncanny, demonic and fascinating in her.”
―
Leo Tolstoy
“In all history there is no war which was not hatched by the governments, the governments
alone, independent of the interests of the people, to whom war is always pernicious even
when successful.
―
Leo Tolstoy
Why am I going?" he repeated, looking straight into her eyes. "You know that I am going in
order to be where you are," said he. "I cannot do otherwise."
―
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
“Pure and complete sorrow is as impossible as pure and complete joy.”
―
Leo Tolstoy
“History would be a wonderful thing – if it were only true.”
―
Leo Tolstoy
“Because of the self-confidence with which he had spoken, no one could tell whether what he
said was very clever or very stupid.
―
Leo Tolstoy
