“Why nowadays there's a new fashion every day.”
―
Leo Tolstoy
“It's hard to love a woman and do anything.”
―
Leo Tolstoy
“It is not beauty that endears, it's love that makes us see beauty.”
―
Leo Tolstoy
“Even in the valley of the shadow of death, two and two do not make six.”
―
Leo Tolstoy
“Not in order to justify, but simply in order to explain my lack of consistency, I say: Look at
my present life and then at my former life, and you will see that I do attempt to carry them out.
It is true that I have not fulfilled one thousandth part of them [Christian precepts], and I am
ashamed of this, but I have failed to fulfill them not because I did not wish to, but because I
was unable to. Teach me how to escape from the net of temptations that surrounds me, help
me and I will fulfill them; even without help I wish and hope to fulfill them.
―
Leo Tolstoy
“Be bad, but at least don't be a liar, a deceiver!”
―
Leo Tolstoy
“But the law of loving others could not be discovered by reason, because it is unreasonable.”
―
Leo Tolstoy
“One of the first conditions of happiness is that the link between Man and Nature shall not
be broken.”
―
Leo Tolstoy
“The antagonism between life and conscience may be removed in two ways: by a change
of life or by a change of conscience.”
―
Leo Tolstoy
“The subject of history is the life of peoples and of humanity. To catch and pin down in
words--that is, to describe directly the life, not only of humanity, but even of a single people,
appears to be impossible.”
―
Leo Tolstoy
“How good it would be to know where to look for help in this life and what to expect after it,
there, beyond the grave! How happy and calm I'd be, if I could say now: Lord, have mercy on
me! ... But to whom shall I say it? Either it is an indefinable, unfathomable power, which I not
only cannot address, but which I cannot express in words - the great all or nothing...or it is that
God of whom Princess Marya has sewn in here, in this amulet? Nothing, nothing is certain,
except the insignificance of everything I can comprehend and the grandeur of something
incomprehensible but most important!
―
Leo Tolstoy
“One must be cunning and wicked in this world.”
―
Leo Tolstoy
“truth, like gold, is to be obtained not by its growth, but by washing away from it all that is
not gold.”
―
Leo Tolstoy
“She was in that highly-wrought state when the reasoning powers act with great rapidity: the
state a man is in before a battle or a struggle, in danger, and at the decisive moments of life -
those moments when a man shows once and for all what he is worth, that his past was not
lived in vain but was a preparation for these moments.”
―
Leo Tolstoy
