“He never chooses an opinion, he just wears whatever happens to be in style.”
―
Leo Tolstoy
“My principal sin is doubt. I doubt everything, and am in doubt most of the time.”
―
Leo Tolstoy
“When an apple has ripened and falls, why does it fall? Because of its attraction to the
earth, because its stalk withers, because it is dried by the sun, because it grows heavier,
because the wind shakes it, or because the boy standing below wants to eat it?”
―
Leo Tolstoy
“... in marriage the great thing was love, and that with love one would always be happy, for
happiness rests only on oneself.”
―
Leo Tolstoy
“If a man aspires to a righteous life, his first act of abstinence if from injury to animals.”
―
Leo Tolstoy
“Even in the valley of the shadow of death, two and two do not make six.”
―
Leo Tolstoy
He felt like a man who, after straining his eyes to peer into the remote distance, finds what
he was seeking at his very feet. All his life he had been looking over the heads of those
around him, while he had only to look before him without straining his eyes.”
―
Leo Tolstoy
“Faith is neither hope nor trust, but a particular spiritual state. Faith is man’s awareness that
his position in the world obliges him to perform certain actions. A person acts according to his
faith, not as the catechism says because he believes in things unseen as in things seen, nor
because he wishes to achieve things hoped for, but simply because having defined his
position in the world it is natural for him to act according to it.”
―
Leo Tolstoy
“And indeed, if Evgeny Irtenev was mentally ill, then all people are just as mentally ill, and
the most mentally ill are undoubtably those who see signs of madness in others that they do
not see in themselves.”
―
Leo Tolstoy
“Olenin always took his own path and had an unconscious objection to the beaten tracks.”
―
Leo Tolstoy
“A little muzhik was working on the railroad, mumbling in his beard.
―
Leo Tolstoy
“- Every girl is proud of an offer, Yes, every girl, but not she”
―
Leo Tolstoy
“Her motherly instinct told her that there was too much of something in Natasha, and that it
would prevent her from being happy.”
―
Leo Tolstoy
“All we can know is that we know nothing. And that's the height of human wisdom.”
―
Leo Tolstoy