“Happiness consists in always aspiring perfection, the pause in any level in perfection is the
pause of happiness”
―
Leo Tolstoy
“Natasha was happy as she had never been in her life. She was at that highest pitch of
happiness, when one becomes completely good and kind, and disbelieves in the very
possibility of evil, unhappiness, and sorrow.”
―
Leo Tolstoy
“...the more he did nothing, the less time he had to do anything.”
―
Leo Tolstoy
“If you look for perfection, you will never be satisfied.”
―
Leo Tolstoy
“A wound in the soul, coming from the rending of the spiritual body, strange as it may seem,
gradually closes like a physical wound. And once a deep wound heals over and the edges
seem to have knit, a wound in the soul, like a physical wound, can be healed only by the force
of life pushing up from inside.This was the way Natasha's wound healed. She thought her life was over. But suddenly her
love for her mother showed her that the essence of life - love - was still alive in her. Love
awoke, and life awoke.”
―
Leo Tolstoy
“In the midst of winter, I find within me the invisible summer...”
―
Leo Tolstoy
“Writing laws is easy, but governing is difficult.”
―
Leo Tolstoy
“vegetarianism is the taproot of humanitarianism.”
―
Leo Tolstoy
“It is not beauty that endears, it's love that makes us see beauty.”
―
Leo Tolstoy
“Universal military service may be compared to the efforts of a man to prop up his falling
house who so surrounds it and fills it with props and buttresses and planks and scaffolding
that he manages to keep the house standing only by making it impossible to live in it.”
―
Leo Tolstoy
“Now that Vronsky had deceived her, she was prepared to love Levin and to hate Vronsky.”
―
Leo Tolstoy
“With all my soul I longed to be in a position to join with the people in performing the rites of
their faith, but I could not do it. I felt that I would be lying to myself, mocking what was sacred
to me, if I were to go through with it.”
―
Leo Tolstoy
“Napoleon, the man of genius, did this! But to say that he destroyed his army because he
wished to, or because he was very stupid, would be as unjust as to say that he had brought
his troops to Moscow because he wished to and because he was very clever and a genius”
―
Leo Tolstoy
“Man lives consciously for himself, but is an unconscious instrument in the attainment of the
historic, universal aims of humanity.
―
Leo Tolstoy
