“I shall go on in the same way, losing my temper...there will be still the same wall between
the holy of holies of my soul and other people...but my life now, my whole life apart from
anything that can happen to me, every minute of it is no more meaningless, as it was before,
but it has the positive meaning of goodness, which I have the power to put into it.”
―
Leo Tolstoy
“You are all misleading one another, and are yourselves deceived. The sun does not go
round the earth, but the earth goes round the sun, revolving as it goes, and turning towards
the sun in the course of each twenty-four hours, not only Japan, and the Philippines, and
Sumatra where we now are, but Africa, and Europe, and America, and many lands besides.
The sun does not shine for some one mountain, or for some one island, or for some one sea,
nor even for one earth alone, but for other planets as well as our earth. If you would only look
up at the heavens, instead of at the ground beneath your own feet, you might all understand
this, and would then no longer suppose that the sun shines for you, or for your country alone.”
―
Leo Tolstoy
“Though men in their hundreds of thousands had tried their hardest to disfigure that little
corner of the earth where they had crowded themselves together, paving the ground with
stones so that nothing could grow, weeding out every blade of vegetation, filling the air with
the fumes of coal and gas, cutting down trees and driving away every beast and every bird --
spring, however, was still spring, even in the town. The sun shone warm, the grass, wherever
it had not been scraped away, revived and showed green not only on the narrow strips of lawn
on the boulevards but between the paving-stones as well, and the birches, the poplars and the
wild cherry-trees were unfolding their sticky, fragrant leaves, and the swelling buds were
bursting on the lime trees; the jackdaws, the sparrows and the pigeons were cheerfully getting
their nests ready for the spring, and the flies, warmed by the sunshine, buzzed gaily along the
walls. All were happy -- plants, birds, insects and children. But grown-up people -- adult men
and women -- never left off cheating and tormenting themselves and one another. It was not
this spring morning which they considered sacred and important, not the beauty of God's
world, given to all creatures to enjoy -- a beauty which inclines the heart to peace, to harmony
and to love. No, what they considered sacred and important were their own devices for
wielding power over each other.”
―
Leo Tolstoy
“Only people who are capable of loving strongly can also suffer great sorrow, but this same
necessity of loving serves to counteract their grief and heals them.”
―
Leo Tolstoy
“I have discovered nothing. I have only found out what I knew. I understand the force that in
the past gave me life, and now too gives me life. I have been set free from falsity, I have found
the Master.”
―
Leo Tolstoy
“I can't praise a young lady who is alive only when people are admiring her, but as soon as
she is left alone, collapses and finds nothing to her taste--one who is all for show and has no
resources in herself”
―
Leo Tolstoy
“We can know only that we know nothing. And that is the highest degree of human wisdom.”
―
Leo Tolstoy
“wisdom needs no violence...As it is we have played at war – that’s what’s vile! We play at
magnanimity and all that stuff. Such magnanimity and sensibility are like the magnanimity and
sensibility of a lady who faints when she sees a calf being killed: she is so kindhearted that
she can’t look at blood, but enjoys eating the calf served up with sauce...If there was none of
this magnanimity in war, we should go to war only when it was worth while going to certain
death, as it is now. Then there would not be war because Paul Ivanovich had offended
Michael Ivanovich.”
―
Leo Tolstoy
“A man is like a fraction whose numerator is what he is and whose denominator is what he
thinks of himself. The larger the denominator, the smaller the fraction.”
―
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
“...but most of all he liked to listen to stories of real life. He smiled gleefully as he listened to
such stories, putting in words and asking questions, all aiming at bringing out clearly the moral
beauty of the action of which he was told. Attachments, friendships, love, as Pierre understood
them, Karataev had none, but he loved and lived on affectionate terms with every creature
with whom he was thrown in life, and especially so with man- not with any particular man, but
with the men that happened to be before his eyes.
But his life, as he looked at it, had no meaning as a separate life. It only had meaning as part
of a whole, of which he was at all times conscious.”
―
Leo Tolstoy
“If a man aspires to a righteous life, his first act of abstinence if from injury to animals.”
―
Leo Tolstoy
“But neither of them dared speak of it, and not having expressed the one thing that
occupied their thoughts, whatever they said rang false.”
―
Leo Tolstoy
“To know God and to live is one and the same thing. God is life.”
―
Leo Tolstoy
“Every man and every living creature has a sacred right to the gladness of springtime.”
―
Leo Tolstoy