“In order not to give myself up to the desire to kill him on the spot, I felt compelled to treat
him cordially.”
―
Leo Tolstoy
“He walked down, for a long while avoiding looking at her as at the sun, but seeing her, as
one does the sun, without looking.”
―
Leo Tolstoy
“Having then for the first time clearly understood that before every man, and before himself,
there lay only suffering, death, and eternal oblivion, he had concluded that to live under such
conditions was impossible; that one must either explain life to oneself so that it does not seem
to be an evil mockery by some sort of devil, or one must shoot oneself.
―
Leo Tolstoy
“What a terrible thing war is, what a terrible thing!”
―
Leo Tolstoy
“We should show life neither as it is or as it ought to be, but only as we see it in our
dreams.”
―
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 march of humanity, springing as it does from an infinite multitude of individual wills, is
continuous.”
―
Leo Tolstoy
“marveling at this boldness and ease in her presence, and not for one second losing sight
of her, though he did not look at her. He felt as though the sun were coming near him.”
―
Leo Tolstoy
“And so there was no single cause for war, but it happened simply because it had to
happen”
―
Leo Tolstoy
“Everything ends in death, everything. Death is terrible.”
―
Leo Tolstoy
“Respect is an invention of people who want to cover up the empty place where love should
be.”
―
Leo Tolstoy
“I assure you that I sleep anywhere, and always like a dormouse.”
―
Leo Tolstoy
“As the sun and each atom of ether is a shphere complete in itself, yet at the same time
only a part of a whole too vast for man to comprehend, so each individual bears within himself
his own purpose, yet bears it ot serve a general purpose unfathomable to man.”
―
Leo Tolstoy
“The very nastiest and coarsest, I can't tell you. It is not grief, not dullness, but much worse.
It is as if all that was good in me had hidden itself, and only what is horrid remains.
―
Leo Tolstoy
“...the role of the disappointed lover of a maiden or of any single woman might be
ridiculous; but the role of a man who was pursuing a married woman, and who made it the
purpose of his life at all cost to draw her into adultery, was one which had in it something
beautiful and dignified and could never be ridiculous....”
―
Leo Tolstoy
