“Well, what is that to me? I can't see her!" she cried.”
―
Leo Tolstoy
“Why is gambling forbidden while women in costumes which evoke sensuality are not
forbidden? They are a thousand times more dangerous!”
―
Leo Tolstoy
“How often we sin, how much we deceive, and all for what?
―
Leo Tolstoy
“The subject of history is the life of peoples and mankind.”
―
Leo Tolstoy
“Anna smiled,as people smile at the weaknesses of those they love. . .”
―
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
“A man is never such an egotist as at moments of spiritual ecstasy. At such times it seems
to him that there is nothing on earth more splendid and interesting than himself.”
―
Leo Tolstoy
“For if we allow that human life is always guided by reason, we destroy the premise that life
is possible at all.
―
Leo Tolstoy
“Having then for the first time clearly understood that before every man, and before himself,
there lay only suffering, death, and eternal oblivion, he had concluded that to live under such
conditions was impossible; that one must either explain life to oneself so that it does not seem
to be an evil mockery by some sort of devil, or one must shoot oneself.
―
Leo Tolstoy
“As though I had been going steadily downhill, imagining that I was going uphill. So it was in
fact. In public opinion I was going uphill, and steadily as I got up it, life was ebbing away from
me....And now the work's done, there's only death.”
―
Leo Tolstoy
“truth, like gold, is to be obtained not by its growth, but by washing away from it all that is
not gold.”
―
Leo Tolstoy
“And so there was no single cause for war, but it happened simply because it had to
happen”
―
Leo Tolstoy
“He knew that Vronsky could not be prevented from amusing himself with painting; he knew
that he and all dilettanti had a perfect right to paint what they liked, but it was distasteful to
him. A man could not be prevented from making himself a big wax doll, and kissing it. But if
the man were to come with the doll and sit before a man in love, and began caressing his doll
as the lover caressed the woman he loved, it would be distasteful to the lover. Just such a
distasteful sensation was what Mihailov felt at the sight of Vronsky’s painting: he felt it both
ludicrous and irritating, both pitiable and offensive.”
―
Leo Tolstoy
“And then all at once love turns up, and you're done for, done for.”
―
Leo Tolstoy
