“Historians are like deaf people who go on answering questions that no one has asked them.”

Leo Tolstoy

“Every man experiences what you call love for every pretty woman and least of all for his wife. That is what the proverb says, and it is a true one. "Another's wife is a swan, but one's own is bitter wormwood.”

Leo Tolstoy

“intriguing people have to invent a noxious, dangerous party...”

Leo Tolstoy

“I ask one thing: I ask the right to hope and suffer as I do now."

Leo Tolstoy

“It was all so strange, so unlike what he had been looking forward to.”

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

“It's too easy to criticize a man when he's out of favour, and to make him shoulder the blame for everybody else's mistakes.”

Leo Tolstoy

“Let them judge me as they like, I could deceive them, but myself I cannot deceive...and strange to say, in this acknowledgement of his baseness there was something painful yet joyful and quieting. More than once in Nekhlyudov's life there had been what he called, 'a cleansing of the soul.' A state of mind in which, after a long period of sluggish inner life...he began to clear out all the rubbish that had accumulated in his soul and caused the cessation of true life. After such an awakening, Nekhlyudov always made some rules for himself...wrote in his diary, began afresh... ”

Leo Tolstoy

“The most important acts, both for the one who accomplishes them and for his fellow creatures, are those that have remote consequences.”

Leo Tolstoy

“...the more he did nothing, the less time he had to do anything.”

Leo Tolstoy

“He had the unlucky capacity many men have of seeing and believing in the possibility of goodness and truth, but of seeing the evil and falsehood of life too clearly to take any serious part in it.”

Leo Tolstoy

“There are no conditions to which a man may not become accustomed, particularly if he sees that they are accepted by those about him.”

Leo Tolstoy

“but that what was for him the greatest and most cruel injustice appeared to others a quite ordinary occurrence.”

Leo Tolstoy

“According to the biblical tradition the absence of work -- idleness -- was a condition of the first man's state of blessedness before the Fall. The love of idleness has been preserved in fallen man, but now a heavy curse lies upon him, not only because we have to earn our bread by the sweat of our brow, but also because our sense of morality will not allow us to be both idle and at ease. Whenever we are idle a secret voice keeps telling us to feel guilty. If man could discover a state in which he could be idle and still feel useful and on the path of duty, he would have regained one aspect of that primitive state of blessedness. And there is one such state of enforced and irreproachable idleness enjoyed by an entire class of men -- the military class. It is this state of enforced and irreproachable idleness that forms the chief attraction of military service, and it always will.

Leo Tolstoy

“But that had been grief--this was joy. Yet that grief and this joy were alike outside all the ordinary conditions of life; they were loopholes, as it were, in that ordinary life through which there came glimpses of something sublime. And in the contemplation of this sublime something the soul was exalted to inconceivable heights of which it had before had no conception, while reason lagged behind, unable to keep up with it.”

Leo Tolstoy


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