“Love..." she repeated slowly, in a musing voice, and suddenly, while disentangling the
lace, she added: "The reason I dislike this word because it means such a great deal to me, far
more than you can understand.”
―
Leo Tolstoy
“truth, like gold, is to be obtained not by its growth, but by washing away from it all that is
not gold.”
―
Leo Tolstoy
“Music makes me forget my real situation. It transports me into a state which is not my own.
Under the influence of music I really seem to feel what I do not feel, to understand what I do
not understand, to have powers which I cannot have. Music seems to me to act like yawning
or laughter; I have no desire to sleep, but I yawn when I see others yawn; with no reason to
laugh, I laugh when I hear others laugh. And music transports me immediately into the
condition of soul in which he who wrote the music found himself at that time. ~The Kreutzer
Sonata”
―
Leo Tolstoy
“Can it be that I have not lived as one ought?" suddenly came into his head. "But how not
so, when I've done everything as it should be done?”
―
Leo Tolstoy
“A better life can only come when the consciousness of men is altered for the better; and
therefore, those who wish to improve life must direct all their efforts towards changing both
their own and other people’s consciousness.”
―
Leo Tolstoy
“Mathematics is the queen of disciplines.... it will drive the nonsense out of your head!”
―
Leo Tolstoy
“One might murder and steal and yet be happy”
―
Leo Tolstoy
Everything that I know, I know only because I love.
―
Leo Tolstoy
“In order not to give myself up to the desire to kill him on the spot, I felt compelled to treat
him cordially.”
―
Leo Tolstoy
“Then as now much time was spent arguing about the rights of women, husband-and-wife
relationships and freedom and rights within marriage, but Natasha had no interest in any such
questions.
Questions like these, then as now, existed exclusively for people who see marriage only in
terms of satisfaction given and received by the married couple, though this is only one
principle of married life rather than its overall meaning, which lies in the family.”
―
Leo Tolstoy
“Perhaps it's because I appreciate all I have so much that I don't worry about what I haven't
got.”
―
Leo Tolstoy
“To tell the truth is very difficult, and young people are rarely capable of it.”
―
Leo Tolstoy
“She was as easy to recognize in that crowd as a rose among nettles.”
―
Leo Tolstoy
“The vocation of every man and woman is to serve people. ”
―
Leo Tolstoy
“Those are the men,' added Bolkonsky with a sigh which he could not suppress, as they
went out of the palace, 'those are the men who decide the fate of nations.”
―
Leo Tolstoy
