“I wanted movement and not a calm course of existence. I wanted excitement and the
chance to sacrifice myself for my love. I felt it in myself a superabundance of energy which
found no outlet in our quiet life.”
―
Leo Tolstoy
“I sit on a man's back choking him and making him carry me, and yet assure myself and others
that i am sorry for him and wish to lighten his load by all means possible....except by getting
off his back.”
―
Leo Tolstoy
“As often happens between men who have chosen different pursuits, each, while in
argument justifying the other's activity, despised it in the depth of his heart.”
―
Leo Tolstoy
What did that show? It showed that he had lived well, but thought badly.”
―
Leo Tolstoy
“In historical events great men-so called-are but the labels that serve to give a mane to an
event, and like labels, they have the last possible connection with the event itself. Every action
of theirs, that seems to them an act of their own free will, is in an historical sense not free at
all, but in bondage to the whole course of previous history, and predestined from all eternity.”
―
Leo Tolstoy
“Death, the inevitable end of everything, confronted him for the first time with irresistible
force. And that Death which was present in this dear brother (who, waking up, moaned and by
habit called indiscriminately on God and on the devil) was not so far away as it hitherto
seemed to be. It was within himself to- he felt it. If not today, then tomorrow or thirty years
hence, was it not all the same? But what that inevitable Death was, he not only did not know,
not only had never considered, but could not and dared not consider.”
―
Leo Tolstoy
“but that what was for him the greatest and most cruel injustice appeared to others a quite
ordinary occurrence.”
―
Leo Tolstoy
“To tell the truth is very difficult, and young people are rarely capable of it.”
―
Leo Tolstoy
“One must do one of two tings: either admit that the existing order of society is just, and
then stick up for one's rights in it;or acknowledge that you are enjoying unjust privileges, as i
do, and then enjoy them and be satisfied.”
―
Leo Tolstoy
“We are conscious of the force of man's life, and we call it freedom”
―
Leo Tolstoy
“Freethinkers are those who are willing to use their minds without prejudice and without
fearing to understand things that clash with their own customs, privileges, or beliefs. This state
of mind is not common, but it is essential for right thinking; where it is absent, discussion is apt
to become worse than useless.”
―
Leo Tolstoy
. “Freethinkers are those who are willing to use their minds without prejudice and without
fearing to understand things that clash with their own customs, privileges, or beliefs. This state
of mind is not common, but it is essential for right thinking...
―
Leo Tolstoy
“The acquisition by dishonest means and cunning,' said Levin, feeling that he was
incapable of clearly defining the borderline between honesty and dishonesty. 'Like the profits
made by banks,' he went on. 'This is evil, I mean, the acquisition of enormous fortunes without
work, as it used to be with the spirit monopolists. Only the form has changed. Le roi est mort,
vive le roi! Hardly were the monopolies abolished before railways and banks appeared: just
another way of making money without work.”
―
Leo Tolstoy
“wisdom needs no violence...As it is we have played at war – that’s what’s vile! We play at
magnanimity and all that stuff. Such magnanimity and sensibility are like the magnanimity and
sensibility of a lady who faints when she sees a calf being killed: she is so kindhearted that
she can’t look at blood, but enjoys eating the calf served up with sauce...If there was none of
this magnanimity in war, we should go to war only when it was worth while going to certain
death, as it is now. Then there would not be war because Paul Ivanovich had offended
Michael Ivanovich.”
―
Leo Tolstoy
“At the advent of danger there are always two voices that speak with equal force in the
human heart: one very reasonably invites a man to consider the nature of the peril and the
means of escaping it; the other, with a still greater show of reason, argues that it is too
depressing and painful to think of the danger since it is not in man's power to foresee
everything and avert the general march of events, and it is better therefore to shut one's eyes
to the disagreeable until it actually comes, and to think instead of what is pleasant. When a
man is alone he generally listens to the first voice; in the company of his fellow-men, to the
second.”
―
Leo Tolstoy
