“Something magical has happened to me: like a dream when one feels frightened and creepy,
and suddenly wakes up to the knowledge that no such terrors exist. I have wakened up.”
―
Leo Tolstoy
“no disease suffered by a live man can be known, for every living person has his own
peculiarities and always has his own peculiar, personal, novel, complicated disease, unknown
to medicine -- not a disease of the lungs, liver, skin, heart, nerves, and so on mentioned in
medical books, but a disease consisting of one of the innumerable combinations of the
maladies of those organs. This simple thought could not occur to the doctors (as it cannot
occur to a wizard that he is unable to work his charms) because the business of their lives was
to cure, and they received money for it and had spent the best years of their lives on that
business. But above all that thought was kept out of their minds by the fact that they saw they
were really useful [...] Their usefulness did not depend on making the patient swallow
substances for the most part harmful (the harm was scarcely perceptible because they were
given in small doses) but they were useful, necessary, and indispensable because they
satisfied a mental need of the invalid and those who loved her -- and that is why there are, and
always will be, pseudo-healers, wise women, homoeopaths, and allopaths. They satisfied that
eternal human need for hope of relief, for sympathy, and that something should be done,
which is felt by those who are suffering.”
―
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
“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
“No, you’re going in vain,” she mentally addressed a company in a coach-and-four who
were evidently going out of town for some merriment. “And the dog you’re taking with you
won’t help you. You won’t get away from yourselves.”
―
Leo Tolstoy
“Historians are like deaf people who go on answering questions that no one has asked
them.”
―
Leo Tolstoy
“A good player who loses at chess is genuinely convinced hat he has lost because of a
mistake, and he looks for this mistake in the beginning of his game, but forgets that there were
also mistakes at ever step in the course of the game, that none of his moves was perfect. The
mistake he pays attention to is conspicuous only because his opponent took advantage of it.”
―
Leo Tolstoy
“Yes, there is something in me hateful, repulsive," thought Ljewin, as he came away from
the Schtscherbazkijs', and walked in the direction of his brother's lodgings. "And I don't get on
with other people. Pride, they say. No, I have no pride. If I had any pride, I should not have put
myself in such a position"
―
Leo Tolstoy
“All the stories and descriptions of that time without exception peak only of the patriotism,
self-sacrifice, despair, grief, and heroism of the Russians. But in reality it was not like
that...The majority of the people paid no attention to the general course of events but were
influenced only by their immediate personal interests.”
―
Leo Tolstoy
“The shore was God, the stream was tradition, and the oars were the free will given to me
to make it to the shore where I would be joined with God. Thus the force of life was renewed
within me, and I began to live once again.”
―
Leo Tolstoy
“I wanted to run after him, but remembered that it is ridiculous to run after one's wife's lover
in one's socks; and I did not wish to be ridiculous but terrible.”
―
Leo Tolstoy
“The most mentally deranged people are certainly those who see in others indications of
insanity they do not notice in themselves.”
―
Leo Tolstoy
Attack me, I do this myself, but attack me rather than the path I follow and which I point out
to anyone who asks me where I think it lies. If I know the way home and am walking along it
drunkenly, is it any less the right way because I am staggering from side to side! If it is not the
right way, then show me another way; but if I stagger and lose the way, you must help me, you
must keep me on the true path, just as I am ready to support you. Do not mislead me, do not
be glad that I have got lost, do not shout out joyfully: “Look at him! He said he was going
home, but there he is crawling into a bog!” No, do not gloat, but give me your help and
support.”
―
Leo Tolstoy
“My principal sin is doubt. I doubt everything, and am in doubt most of the time.”
―
Leo Tolstoy
