“It seems that only God can know the truth; it is to Him alone we must appeal, and from Him
alone expect mercy.”
―
Leo Tolstoy
“It's wrong, what you say, and I beg you, if you're a good man, to forget what you've said, as I
forget it," she said at last.
―
Leo Tolstoy
“Society in itself is no great harm, but unsatisfied social aspirations are a bad and ugly
business. We must certainly accept, and we will.”
―
Leo Tolstoy
“She did worse than break the law, she broke the rules”
―
Leo Tolstoy
“I think that in order to know love one must make a mistake and then correct it.”
―
Leo Tolstoy
“Nikolushka and his upbringing, Andre, and religion were Princess Marya's comforts and
joys; but, besides that, since every human being needs his personal hope, Princess Marya
had in the deepest recesses of her soul a hidden dream and hope, which provided the main
comfort of her life.”
―
Leo Tolstoy
“And once he had seen this, he could never again see it otherwise, just as we cannot
reconstruct an illusion once it has been explained.”
―
Leo Tolstoy
“He was in a fairy kingdom where everything was possible.
He looked up at the sky. And the sky was a fairy realm like the earth. It was clearing, and over
the tops of the trees clouds were swiftly sailing as if unveiling the stars.”
―
Leo Tolstoy
“I don't allow myself to doubt myself even for a moment.”
―
Leo Tolstoy
“Levin had often noticed in arguments between even the most intelligent people that after
enormous efforts, an enormous number of logical subtleties and words, the arguers would
finally come to the awareness that what they had spent so long struggling to prove to each
other had been known to them long, long before, from the beginning of the argument, but that
they loved different things and therefore did not want to name what they loved, so as not to be
challenged. He had often felt that sometimes during an argument you would understand what
your opponent loves, and suddenly come to love the same thing yourself, and agree all at
once, and then all reasonings would fall away as superfluous; and sometimes it was the other
way round: you would finally say what you yourself love, for the sake of which you are
inventing your reasonings, and if you happened to say it well and sincerely, the opponent
would suddenly agree and stop arguing. That was the very thing he wanted to say.
―
Leo Tolstoy
“A little muzhik was working on the railroad, mumbling in his beard.
―
Leo Tolstoy
“People of limited intelligence are fond of talking about "these days," imagining that they
have discovered and appraised the peculiarities of "these days" and that human nature
changes with the times.”
―
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
“Are we not all flung into the world for no other purpose than to hate each other, and so to
torture ourselves and one another?”
―
Leo Tolstoy
“Death, the inevitable end of everything, confronted him for the first time with irresistible
force.
―
Leo Tolstoy
