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 fulfillment 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 know 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 guessed of what it consisted. The truth was that life is meaningless. I had as it were lived, lived, and walked, walked, till I had come to a precipice and saw clearly that there was nothing ahead of me but destruction. It was impossible to stop, impossible to go back, and impossible to close my eyes or avoid seeing that there was nothing ahead but suffering and real death--complete annihilation.”

Leo Tolstoy

“So you see,' said Stepan Arkadyich, 'you're a very wholesome man. That is your virtue and your defect. You have a wholesome character, and you want all of life to be made up of wholesome phenomena, but that doesn't happen. So you despise the activity of public service because you want things always to correspond to their aim, and that doesn't happen. You also want the activity of the individual man always to have an aim, that love and family life always be one. And that doesn't happen. All the variety, all the charm, all the beauty of life are made up of light and shade.”

Leo Tolstoy

“Pure and complete sorrow is as impossible as pure and complete joy.”

Leo Tolstoy

“What a terrible thing war is, what a terrible thing!”

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

“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

“Life is everything. Life is God. Everything shifts and moves, and this movement is God. And while there is life, there is delight in the self-awareness of the divinity. To love life is to love God. The hardest and most blissful thing is to love this life in one's suffering, in the guiltlessness of suffering.

Leo Tolstoy

“I think that to find out what love is really like, one must first make a mistake and then put it right.”

Leo Tolstoy

“Historians are like deaf people who go on answering questions that no one has asked them.”

Leo Tolstoy

“I'm like a starving man who has been given food. Maybe he's cold, and his clothes are torn, and he's ashamed, but he's not unhappy.”

Leo Tolstoy

“Every violent reform deserves censure, for it quite fails to remedy evil while men remain what they are, and also because wisdom needs no violence.”

Leo Tolstoy

“He stepped down, avoiding any long look at her as one avoids long looks at the sun, but seeing her as one sees the sun, without looking.”

Leo Tolstoy

“If you look for perfection, you will never be satisfied.”

Leo Tolstoy

“This child, with his naive outlook on life was the compass which showed them the degree of their departure from what they knew but did not want to know.”

Leo Tolstoy

“Whatever our fate is or may be, we have made it and do not complain of it."

Leo Tolstoy


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