“There is nothing certain, nothing at all except the unimportance of everything I understand,
and the greatness of something incomprehensible but all-important.”
―
Leo Tolstoy
“kitty always assumed the most beautiful things about people”
―
Leo Tolstoy
“In captivity, in the shed, Pierre had learned, not with his mind, but with his whole being, his
life, that man is created for happiness, that happiness is within him, in the satisfying of natural
human needs, and that all unhappiness comes not from lack, but from superfluity; but now, in
these last three weeks of the march, he had learned a new and more comforting truth - he had
learned that there is nothing frightening in the world. He had learned that, as there is no
situation in the world in which a man can be happy and perfectly free, so there is no situation
in which he can be perfectly unhappy and unfree. He had learned that there is a limit to
suffering and a limit to freedom, and that those limits are very close; that the man who suffers
because one leaf is askew in his bed of roses, suffers as much as he now suffered falling
asleep on the bare, damp ground, one side getting cold as the other warmed up; that when he
used to put on his tight ballroom shoes, he suffered just as much as now, when he walked
quite barefoot (his shoes had long since worn out) and his feet were covered with sores.”
―
Leo Tolstoy
“What counts in making a happy marriage is not so much how compatible you are but how you
deal with incompatibility.
―
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
“A man's every action is inevitably conditioned by what surrounds him and by his own
body.”
―
Leo Tolstoy
“It's not so much that he can't fall in love, but he has not the weakness necessary.”
―
Leo Tolstoy
“Pierre looked into the sky, into the depths of the retreating, twinkling stars. "And all this is
mine, and all this is in me, and all this is me!" thought Pierre. "And all this they've caught and
put in a shed and boarded it up!”
―
Leo Tolstoy
“In the midst of winter, I find within me the invisible summer...”
―
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
“And then all at once love turns up, and you're done for, done for.”
―
Leo Tolstoy
“Everything I know, I know because of love”
―
Leo Tolstoy
“What is reason given me for, if I am not to use it to avoid bringing unhappy beings into the
world!”
―
Leo Tolstoy
“We shall all of us die, so why should I grudge a little trouble?”
―
Leo Tolstoy
“Some one dear to one can be loved with human love; but an enemy can only be loved with
divine love.”
―
Leo Tolstoy
