“Just as a painter needs light in order to put the finishing touches to his picture, so I need
an inner light, which I feel I never have enough of in the autumn.”
―
Leo Tolstoy
“Love. The reason I dislike that word is that it means too much for me, far more than you can
understand."
―
Leo Tolstoy
“At that moment it meant nothing to him who might be standing over him, or what was said
of him; he was only glad that people were standing near him and only wished that they would
help him and bring him back to life, which seemed to him so beautiful now that he had today
learned to understand it so differently.”
―
Leo Tolstoy
“Every man had his personal habits, passions, and impulses toward goodness, beauty, and
truth.”
―
Leo Tolstoy
“Pure and complete sorrow is as impossible as pure and complete joy.”
―
Leo Tolstoy
Pure, perfect sorrow is as impossible as pure and perfect joy.”
―
Leo Tolstoy
“There lay between them, separating them, that same terrible line of the unknown and of
fear, like the line separating the living from the dead.”
―
Leo Tolstoy
“And he has to live like this on the edge of destruction, alone, with nobody at all to
understand or pity him”
―
Leo Tolstoy
“They had supper and went away, and Ivan Ilyich was left alone with the consciousness
that his life was poisoned and was poisoning the lives of others, and that this poison did not
weaken but penetrated more and more deeply into his whole being.
―
Leo Tolstoy
“But that had been grief--this was joy. Yet that grief and this joy were alike outside all the
ordinary conditions of life; they were loopholes, as it were, in that ordinary life through which
there came glimpses of something sublime. And in the contemplation of this sublime
something the soul was exalted to inconceivable heights of which it had before had no
conception, while reason lagged behind, unable to keep up with it.”
―
Leo Tolstoy
“Chance created the situation; genius made use of it.”
―
Leo Tolstoy
“He soon felt that the realization of his desire had given him only a grain of the mountain of
happiness he had expected. It showed him the eternal error people make in imagining that
happiness is the realization of desires.”
―
Leo Tolstoy
“but that what was for him the greatest and most cruel injustice appeared to others a quite
ordinary occurrence.”
―
Leo Tolstoy
“The story of Ivan Ilyich life was of the simplest, most ordinary and therefore most terrible".
Tolstoy defines living an ordinary life as terrible - I really do have to agree!”
―
Leo Tolstoy
