“The social conditions of life can only be improved by people exercising self-restraint.”
―
Leo Tolstoy
“Pierre was right when he said that one must believe in the possibility of happiness in order to
be happy, and I now believe in it. Let the dead bury the dead, but while I'm alive, I must live
and be happy.”
―
Leo Tolstoy
“Man must not check reason by tradition, but contrariwise, must check tradition by reason.”
―
Leo Tolstoy
“Speransky, either because he appreciated Prince Andrey's abilities or because he thought
it as well to secure his adherence, showed off his calm, impartial sagacity before Prince
Andrey, and flattered him with that delicate flattery that goes hand in hand with conceit, and
consists in a tacit assumption that one's companion and oneself are the only people capable
of understanding all the folly of the rest of the world and the sagacity and profundity of their
own ideas.”
―
Leo Tolstoy
Everything that I know, I know only because I love.
―
Leo Tolstoy
“She did not want to talk of her sorrow, but with that sorrow in her heart she could not talk of
outside matters.”
―
Leo Tolstoy
“That only shows you have no heart,’ she said. But her eyes said that she knew he had a
heart, and that was why she was afraid of him”
―
Leo Tolstoy
“Society in itself is no great harm, but unsatisfied social aspirations are a bad and ugly
business. We must certainly accept, and we will.”
―
Leo Tolstoy
“Why, of course," objected Stepan Arkadyevitch. "But that's just the aim of civilization—to
make everything a source of enjoyment.”
―
Leo Tolstoy
“And I, too, am the same... only there is no love in my heart, or desire for love, no interest
in work, not contentment in myself. And how remote and impossible my old religious
enthusiasms seem now... and my former abounding life! What once seemed so plain and right
– that happiness lay in living for others – is unintelligible now. Why live for others, when life
has not attractions even for oneself?”
―
Leo Tolstoy
“I think...if so many men, so many minds, certainly so many hearts, so many kinds of love.”
―
Leo Tolstoy
“Morning or night, Friday or Sunday, made no difference, everything was the same: the
gnawing, excruciating, incessant pain; that awareness of life irrevocably passing but not yet
gone; that dreadful, loathsome death, the only reality, relentlessly closing in on him; and that
same endless lie. What did days, weeks, or hours matter?”
―
Leo Tolstoy
“In his Petersburg world all people were divided into utterly opposed classes. One, the
lower class, vulgar, stupid, and, above all, ridiculous people, who believe that one husband
ought to live with the one wife whom he has lawfully married; that a girl should be innocent, a
woman modest, and a man manly, self-controlled, and strong; that one ought to bring up one's
children, earn one's bread, and pay one's debts; and various similar absurdities. This was the
class of old-fashioned and ridiculous people. But there was another class of people, the real
people. To this class they all belonged, and in it the great thing was to be elegant, generous,
plucky, gay, to abandon oneself without a blush to every passion, and to laugh at everything
else.”
―
Leo Tolstoy
“There was no solution but that usual solution which life gives to all questions, even the
most complex and insoluble. That answer one must live in the needs of one that - that is,
forget oneself.”
―
Leo Tolstoy
