“If goodness has causes, it is not goodness; if it has effects, a reward, it is not goodness
either. So goodness is outside the chain of cause and effect.”
―
Leo Tolstoy
“Drops Dripped. Quiet talk went on. Horses neighed and scuffled. Someone snored.”
―
Leo Tolstoy
“This history of culture will explain to us the motives, the conditions of life, and the thought
of the writer or reformer. ”
―
Leo Tolstoy
Pure, perfect sorrow is as impossible as pure and perfect joy.”
―
Leo Tolstoy
“He was not to blame for being born with an irrepressible charachter and a mind some how
constrained.”
―
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
“He wanted and needed their love, but felt none towards them. He now had neither love nor
humility nor purity”
―
Leo Tolstoy
“He never chooses an opinion, he just wears whatever happens to be in style.”
―
Leo Tolstoy
“Every man experiences what you call love for every pretty woman and least of all for his
wife. That is what the proverb says, and it is a true one. "Another's wife is a swan, but one's
own is bitter wormwood.”
―
Leo Tolstoy
“So he lived, not knowing and not seeing any chance of knowing what he was and for what
purpose he had been placed in the word.”
―
Leo Tolstoy
“Then we should find some artificial inoculation against love, as with smallpox. ”
―
Leo Tolstoy
“Drama, instead of telling us the whole of a man's life, must place him in such a situation, tie
such a knot, that when it is untied, the whole man is visible.”
―
Leo Tolstoy
“It's different for you and me. You study, you become enlightened; I study, I become
confused.”
―
Leo Tolstoy
“Music makes me forget myself, my real position; it transports me to some other position
not my own. Under the influence of music it seems to me that I feel what I do not really feel,
that I understand what I do not understand, that I can do what I cannot do. I explain it by the
fact that music acts like yawning, like laughter: I am not sleepy, but I yawn when I see
someone yawning; there is nothing for me to laugh at, but I laugh when I hear people
laughing.
Music carries me immediately and directly into the mental condition in which the man was who
composed it. My soul merges with his and together with him I pass from one condition into
another, but why this happens I don't know.”
―
Leo Tolstoy
“He felt that now over his every word, his every deed, there was a judge, a judgment, which
was dearer to him than the judgments of all the people in the world. He spoke now, and along
with his words he considered the impression his words would make on Natasha. He did not
deliberately say what would be please her, but whatever he said, he judged himself from her
point of view.”
―
Leo Tolstoy
