“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
“As long as he followed the fixed definition of obscure words such as spirit, will, freedom,
essence, purposely letting himself go into the snare of words the philosophers set for him, he
seemed to comprehend something. But he had only to forget the artificial train of reasoning,
and to turn from life itself to what had satisfied him while thinking in accordance with the fixed
definitions, and all this artificial edifice fell to pieces at once like a house of cards, and it
became clear that the edifice had been built up out of those transposed words, apart from
anything in life more important than reason.”
―
Leo Tolstoy
“At school he had done things which had formerly seemed to him very horrid and made him
feel disgusted with himself when he did them; but when later on he saw that such actions were
done by people of good position and that they did not regard them as wrong, he was able not
exactly to regard them as right, but to forget about them entirely or not be at all troubled at
remembering them.”
―
Leo Tolstoy
“A man on a thousand mile walk has to forget his goal and say to himself every morning,
'Today I'm going to cover twenty-five miles and then rest up and sleep.”
―
Leo Tolstoy
“He stepped down trying not to look long at her, as though she were the sun, yet he saw
her as one sees the sun, without looking.”
―
Leo Tolstoy
“One step across the dividing line, so like the one between the living and the dead and you
enter an unknown world of suffering and death. What will you find there? Who will be there?
There, just just beyond the field, that tree, that sunlit roof? No one knows, and yet you want to
know. You dread crossing that line, and yet you want to cross it. You know sooner or later you
will have to go across and find out what is there beyond it, just as you must inevitably found
out what lies beyond death. Yet here you are, fit and strong, carefree and excited, with men all
around you just the same- strong, excited and full of life.' This is what all men think when they
get sight of the enemy, or they feel it if they do not think it, and it is this feeling that gives a
special lustre and a delicious edge to the awareness of everything that is now happening.”
―
Leo Tolstoy
“Pierre was one of those people who are strong only when they feel themselves perfectly
pure.”
―
Leo Tolstoy
“Happiness is an allegory, unhappiness a story.”
―
Leo Tolstoy
“The march of humanity, springing as it does from an infinite multitude of individual wills, is
continuous.”
―
Leo Tolstoy
“Those whom God wishes to destroy he drives mad.”
―
Leo Tolstoy
“Music makes me forget myself, my real position; it transports me to some other position
not my own. Under the influence of music it seems to me that I feel what I do not really feel,
that I understand what I do not understand, that I can do what I cannot do. I explain it by the
fact that music acts like yawning, like laughter: I am not sleepy, but I yawn when I see
someone yawning; there is nothing for me to laugh at, but I laugh when I hear people
laughing.
Music carries me immediately and directly into the mental condition in which the man was who
composed it. My soul merges with his and together with him I pass from one condition into
another, but why this happens I don't know.”
―
Leo Tolstoy
“Nothing has been discovered, nothing has been invented. We can only know that we know
nothing. And that's the highest degree of human wisdom.”
―
Leo Tolstoy
“You wait a bit, wait a bit," said Stepan Arkadyevitch, smiling and touching his hand. "I've
told you what I know, and I repeat that in this delicate and tender matter, as far as one can
conjecture, I believe the chances are in your favor.”
―
Leo Tolstoy
“There was no answer, except the general answer life gives to all the most complex and
insoluble questions. That answer is: one must live for the needs of the day, in other words,
become oblivious.”
―
Leo Tolstoy
“My life came to a standstill. I could breathe, eat, drink and sleep, and I could not help doing
these things; but there was no life, for there were no wishes the fulfilment of which I could
consider reasonable. If I desired anything, I knew in advance that whether I satisfied my desire
or not, nothing would come of it. Had a fairy come and offered to fulfil my desires I should not
have known what to ask. If in moments of intoxication I felt something which, though not a
wish, was a habit left by former wishes, in sober moments I knew this to be a delusion and that
there was really nothing to wish for. I could not even wish to know the truth, for I guess of what
it consisted. The truth was that life is meaningless.”
―
Leo Tolstoy
