“When you understand that you will die to-morrow, if not to-day, and nothing will be left,
then everything is so unimportant!... So one goes on living, amusing oneself with hunting, with
work - anything so as not think of death”
―
Leo Tolstoy
“God forgive me everything!’ she said, feeling the impossibility of struggling...”
―
Leo Tolstoy
“The more is given the less the people will work for themselves, and the less they work the
more their poverty will increase.”
―
Leo Tolstoy
“One of the first conditions of happiness is that the link between Man and Nature shall not
be broken.”
―
Leo Tolstoy
“Higher and higher receded the sky, wider and wider spread the streak of dawn, whiter
grew the pallid silver of the dew, more lifeless the sickle of the moon...”
―
Leo Tolstoy
“Then we should find some artificial inoculation against love, as with smallpox. ”
―
Leo Tolstoy
“The most mentally deranged people are those who see in others indications of insanity
they do not notice in themselves.”
―
Leo Tolstoy
“Involuntarily it appeared to me that there, somewhere, was someone who amused himself
by watching how I lived for thirty or forty years: learning, developing, maturing in body and
mind, and how, having with matured mental powers reached the summit of life from which it all
lay before me, I stood on that summit -- like an arch-fool -- seeing clearly that there is nothing
in life, and that there has been and will be nothing. And he was amused... But whether that
"someone" laughing at me existed or not, I was none the better off. I could give no reasonable
meaning to any single action or to my whole life. I was only surprised that I could have avoided
understanding this from the very beginning -- it has been so long known to all. Today or
tomorrow sickness and death will come (they had come already) to those I love or to me;
nothing will remain but stench and worms. Sooner or later my affairs, whatever they may be,
will be forgotten, and I shall not exist. Then why go on making any effort?... How can man fail
to see this? And how go on living? That is what is surprising! One can only live while one is
intoxicated with life; as soon as one is sober it is impossible not to see that it is all a mere
fraud and a stupid fraud! That is precisely what it is: there is nothing either amusing or witty
about it, it is simply cruel and stupid.”
―
Leo Tolstoy
“They had to return to the one sure and never-failing resource- slander.”
―
Leo Tolstoy
“[Pierre] involuntarily started comparing these two men, so different and at the same time
so similar, because of the love he had for both of them, and because both had lived and both
had died.”
―
Leo Tolstoy
“We do not love people so much for the good they have done us, as for the good we do
them”
―
Leo Tolstoy
“All the variety, all the charm, all the beauty of life is made up of light and shadow.”
―
Leo Tolstoy
*"Splendid if I overcome My earthy passion, But if I succeed not, Still I have known
happiness!”
―
Leo Tolstoy
“War is the most painful act of subjection to the laws of God that can be required of the
human will.”
―
Leo Tolstoy