“The example of a syllogism that he had studied in Kiesewetter's logic: Caius is a man, men
are mortal, therefore Caius is mortal, had throughout his whole life seemed to him right only in
relation to Caius, but not to him at all.”
―
Leo Tolstoy
“If only [people] understood that every thought is both false and true! False by one-
sidenedness resulting from man's inability to embrace the whole truth, and true as an
expression of one fact of human endeavor.”
―
Leo Tolstoy
“The question was summed up for him thus: "If I do not accept the answers Christianity
gives to the problems of my life, what answers do I accept?”
―
Leo Tolstoy
“Speech is silver but silence is golden.”
―
Leo Tolstoy
“In everything, almost in everything, I wrote I was guided by the need of collecting ideas
which, linked together, would be the expression of myself, though each individual idea,
expressed separately in words, loses its meaning, is horribly debased when only one of the
links, of which it forms a part, is taken by itself. But the interlinking of these ideas is not, I think,
an intellectual process, but something else, and it is impossible to express the source of this
interlinking directly in words; it can only be done indirectly by describing images, actions, and
situations in words.”
―
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
“Friends we shall never be, you know that yourself. Whether we shall be the happiest or the
wretchedest of people--that's in your hands.”
―
Leo Tolstoy
“All happy families are alike; each unhappy family is unhappy in its own way.”
―
Leo Tolstoy
“Talent is the capacity to direct concentrated attention upon the subject: "the gift of seeing
what others have not seen.”
―
Leo Tolstoy
“The antagonism between life and conscience may be removed in two ways: by a change
of life or by a change of conscience.”
―
Leo Tolstoy
“Rummaging in our souls, we often dig up something that ought to have lain there unnoticed. ”
―
Leo Tolstoy
“Everyone thinks of changing the world, but no one thinks of changing himself.”
―
Leo Tolstoy
“Now one often saw only her face and body, while her soul was not seen at all.”
―
Leo Tolstoy
“In order to forgive, one must have lived through what I have lived through, and may God
spare her that.”
―
Leo Tolstoy
