“Everything I know, I know because I love.”
―
Leo Tolstoy
“I've always loved you, and when you love someone, you love the whole person, just as he or
she is, and not as you would like them to be.”
―
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
“Is it really possible to tell someone else what one feels?”
―
Leo Tolstoy
“There is no greatness where simplicity, goodness and truth are absent”
―
Leo Tolstoy
“ I didn’t know you were going. What are you coming for?" she said, letting fall the hand with
which she had grasped the doorpost. And irrepressible delight and eagerness shone in her
face.
"What am I coming for?" he repeated, looking straight into her eyes. "You know that I have
come to be where you are," he said, "I can’t help it.”
―
Leo Tolstoy
“He [Vronsky] himself felt that, except that crazy fellow married to Kitty Shcherbatsky, who,
quite irrelevantly had with rabid virulence told him a lot of pointless nonsense, every nobleman
whose acquaintance he had made had become his partisan.”
―
Leo Tolstoy
“Death, the inevitable end of everything, confronted him for the first time with irresistible
force. And that Death which was present in this dear brother (who, waking up, moaned and by
habit called indiscriminately on God and on the devil) was not so far away as it hitherto
seemed to be. It was within himself to- he felt it. If not today, then tomorrow or thirty years
hence, was it not all the same? But what that inevitable Death was, he not only did not know,
not only had never considered, but could not and dared not consider.”
―
Leo Tolstoy
“He was much changed and grown even thinner since Pyotr Ivanovich had last seen him,
but, as is always the case with the dead, his face was handsomer and above all more dignified
than than when he was alive.”
―
Leo Tolstoy
“Don’t you know that you are all my life to me? ...But peace I do not know, and can’t give to
you. My whole being, my love...yes! I cannot think about you and about myself separately. You
and I are one to me. And I do not see before us the possibility of peace either for me or for
you. I see the possibility of despair, misfortune...or of happiness-what happiness!...Is it
impossible?"
―
Leo Tolstoy
“In the past he had been unable to see the great, teh unfathomable, the infinite, in anything.
He had only felt that it must exist somewhere and had been seeking it. In everything near and
comprehensible he had seen only what was limited, petty, commonplace, and meaningless.
He had equipped himself with a mental telescope and gazed into the distance where the
distance had seemed to him great and infinite only because they were not clearly visible. Such
had Europan life, politics, Masonry, philosophy, and philanthropy seemed to him. Bet even
then, at moments of weakness as he had accounted them, his mind had penetrated that
distance too, and he had seen there the same triviality, worldliness, and absurdity.
―
Leo Tolstoy
“I am not strange but I feel queer. I am like that sometimes. I feel like crying all the time. It is
very silly but it will pass.
―
Leo Tolstoy
“Does it ever happen to you," Natasha said to her brother, when they had settled in the
sitting room, "does it ever happen to you that you feel there's nothing more - nothing; that
everything good has already happened? And it's not really boring, but sad?"
"As if it doesn't!" he said. "It's happened to me that everything's fine, everybody's merry, and it
suddenly comes into my head that it's all tiresome and we all ought to die....”
―
Leo Tolstoy
“Talent is the capacity to direct concentrated attention upon the subject: "the gift of seeing
what others have not seen.”
―
Leo Tolstoy
“Love hinders death. Love is life. All, everything that I understand, I understand because I
love. Everything is united by it alone. Love is God, and to die means that I, a particle of love,
shall return to the general and eternal source." These thoughts seemed to him comforting. But
they were only thoughts. Something was lacking in them, they were not clear, they were too
one-sidedly personal and brain-spun. And there was the former agitation and obscurity.”
―
Leo Tolstoy
