“In order to undertake anything in family life, it is necessary that there be either complete
discord between the spouses or loving harmony.”
―
Leo Tolstoy
“Another's wife is a white swan, and ours is bitter wormwood.”
―
Leo Tolstoy
“I think that to find out what love is really like, one must first make a mistake and then put it
right.”
―
Leo Tolstoy
“I don't think badly of people. I like everybody, and I'm sorry for everybody.”
―
Leo Tolstoy
“The latter part of her stay in Voronezh had been the happiest period in Princess Marya's
life. Her love for Rostov was not then a source of torment or agitation to her. That love had by
then filled her whole soul and become an inseparable part of herself, and she no longer
struggled against it. Of late Princess Marya was convinced- though she never clearly in so
many words admitted it to herself- that she loved and was beloved.”
―
Leo Tolstoy
“Every man had his personal habits, passions, and impulses toward goodness, beauty, and
truth.”
―
Leo Tolstoy
“Whatever our fate is or may be, we have made it and do not complain of it."
―
Leo Tolstoy
“When you love someone, you love the person as they are, and not as you'd like them to be.”
―
Leo Tolstoy
“Everything I know, I know because I love.”
―
Leo Tolstoy
“Universal military service may be compared to the efforts of a man to prop up his falling
house who so surrounds it and fills it with props and buttresses and planks and scaffolding
that he manages to keep the house standing only by making it impossible to live in it.”
―
Leo Tolstoy
“As is always the case with a thoroughly attractive woman, her defect—the shortness of her
upper lip and her half-open mouth—seemed to be her own special and peculiar form of
beauty.”
―
Leo Tolstoy
“There had been in his past, as in every man's, actions, recognized by him as bad, for
which his conscience ought to have tormented him; but the memory of these evil actions was
far from causing him so much suffering as those trivial but humiliating reminiscences.”
―
Leo Tolstoy
“He was afraid of defiling the love which filled his soul.”
―
Leo Tolstoy
“We are all created to be miserable, and that we all know it, and all invent means of
deceiving each other. And when one sees the truth, what is one to do?”
―
Leo Tolstoy
“Why, of course," objected Stepan Arkadyevitch. "But that's just the aim of civilization—to
make everything a source of enjoyment.”
―
Leo Tolstoy
