“Where did I get it from? Was it by reason that I attained to the knowledge that I must love my neighbour and not throttle him? They told me so when I was a child, and I gladly believed it, because they told me what was already in my soul. But who discovered it? Not reason! Reason has discovered the struggle for existence and the law that I must throttle all those who hinder the satisfaction of my desires. That is the deduction reason makes. But the law of loving others could not be discovered by reason, because it is unreasonable.”

Leo Tolstoy

“Anything is better than lies and deceit!

Leo Tolstoy

“A man is never such an egotist as at moments of spiritual ecstasy. At such times it seems to him that there is nothing on earth more splendid and interesting than himself.”

Leo Tolstoy

“Nothing has been discovered, nothing has been invented. We can only know that we know nothing. And that's the highest degree of human wisdom.”

Leo Tolstoy

“the children themselves repaid her griefs with small joys. These joys were so small that they could not be seen, like gold in the sand, and in her bad moments she saw only the griefs, only sand; but there were also good moments, when she saw only joys, only gold.”

Leo Tolstoy

“Then as now much time was spent arguing about the rights of women, husband-and-wife relationships and freedom and rights within marriage, but Natasha had no interest in any such questions. Questions like these, then as now, existed exclusively for people who see marriage only in terms of satisfaction given and received by the married couple, though this is only one principle of married life rather than its overall meaning, which lies in the family.”

Leo Tolstoy

“I felt a wish never to leave that room - a wish that dawn might never come, that my present frame of mind might never change.”

Leo Tolstoy

“The goal of the artist is not to solve a question irrefutably, but to force people to love life in all its countless, inexhaustible manifestations.”

Leo Tolstoy

“And once he had seen this, he could never again see it otherwise, just as we cannot reconstruct an illusion once it has been explained.”

Leo Tolstoy

“I wanted to run after him, but remembered that it is ridiculous to run after one's wife's lover in one's socks; and I did not wish to be ridiculous but terrible.”

Leo Tolstoy

“Having then for the first time clearly understood that before every man, and before himself, there lay only suffering, death, and eternal oblivion, he had concluded that to live under such conditions was impossible; that one must either explain life to oneself so that it does not seem to be an evil mockery by some sort of devil, or one must shoot oneself.

Leo Tolstoy

“I killed the wife when I first tasted sensual joys without love, and then it was that I killed my wife.”

Leo Tolstoy

“You've said nothing, of course, and I ask nothing," he was saying; "but you know that friendship's not what I want: that there's only one happiness in life for me, that word that you dislike so...yes, love!...”

Leo Tolstoy

“To claim that the supernatural and irrational form the basic characteristics of religion is much the same as noticing only the rotten apples and then claiming that the basic features of the fruit named apple are a flaccid bitterness and a harmful effect produced in the stomach.”

Leo Tolstoy

“Well Prince, so Genoa and Lucca are now just family estates of the Buonapartes. But I warn you, if you don't tell me that this means war, if you still try to defend the infamies and horrors perpetrated by that Antichrist— and I really believe he is Antichrist—I will have nothing more to do with you and you are no longer my friend, no longer my 'faithful slave', as you call yourself! But how are you? I see I have frightened you—sit down and tell me all the news.

Leo Tolstoy


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