“Even the strongest current of water cannot add a drop to a cup which is already full. The
most difficult subjects can be explained to the most slow-witted man if he has not formed any
idea of them already; but the simplest thing cannot be made clear to the most intelligent man if
he is firmly persuaded that he knows already, without a shadow of doubt, what is laid before
him.”
―
Leo Tolstoy
“Am I mad, to see what others do not see, or are they mad who are responsible for all that I
am seeing?”
―
Leo Tolstoy
Those two drops of honey, which more than all else had diverted my eyes from the cruel
truth, my love for my family and for my writing, which I called art – I no longer found sweet.
―
Leo Tolstoy
“The story of Ivan Ilyich life was of the simplest, most ordinary and therefore most terrible".
Tolstoy defines living an ordinary life as terrible - I really do have to agree!”
―
Leo Tolstoy
“We are all created to be miserable, and that we all know it, and all invent means of
deceiving each other. And when one sees the truth, what is one to do?”
―
Leo Tolstoy
“I did not myself know what I wanted: I feared life, desired to escape from it, yet still hoped
something of it.”
―
Leo Tolstoy
“I think that when you remember, remember, remember everything like that, you could go
on until you remember what was there before you were in the world. ”
―
Leo Tolstoy
“The only thing that we know is that we know nothing, and that is the highest flight of human
wisdom.”
―
Leo Tolstoy
“By digging into our souls, we often dig up what might better have remained there
unnoticed."
―
Leo Tolstoy
“I think...if so many men, so many minds, certainly so many hearts, so many kinds of love.”
―
Leo Tolstoy
“We love people not so much for the good they've done us, as for the good we've done
them.”
―
Leo Tolstoy
“Our profession is dreadful, writing corrupts the soul.”
―
Leo Tolstoy
“The only absolute knowledge attainable by man is that life is meaningless.”
―
Leo Tolstoy
“Morning or night, Friday or Sunday, made no difference, everything was the same: the
gnawing, excruciating, incessant pain; that awareness of life irrevocably passing but not yet
gone; that dreadful, loathsome death, the only reality, relentlessly closing in on him; and that
same endless lie. What did days, weeks, or hours matter?”
―
Leo Tolstoy
