“When loving with human love one may pass from love to hatred, but divine love cannot
change.”
―
Leo Tolstoy
“Let fear once get possession of the soul, and it does not readily yield its place to another
sentiment.”
―
Leo Tolstoy
“Sitting in his old schoolroom on the sofa with little cushions on the arms and looking into
Natasha's wildly eager eyes, Rostov was carried back into that world of home and childhood
which had no meaning for anyone else, but gave him some of the greatest pleasure in his life.”
―
Leo Tolstoy
“Vronsky saw nothing and no one. He felt himself as a king, not because she had made an
impression on Anna-he did not yet believe that-but because the impression she had made on
him gave him happiness and pride.”
―
Leo Tolstoy
“I don't allow myself to doubt myself even for a moment.”
―
Leo Tolstoy
“As long as he followed the fixed definition of obscure words such as spirit, will, freedom,
essence, purposely letting himself go into the snare of words the philosophers set for him, he
seemed to comprehend something. But he had only to forget the artificial train of reasoning,
and to turn from life itself to what had satisfied him while thinking in accordance with the fixed
definitions, and all this artificial edifice fell to pieces at once like a house of cards, and it
became clear that the edifice had been built up out of those transposed words, apart from
anything in life more important than reason.”
―
Leo Tolstoy
“the chief if not the sole cause of the enslavement of the Indian peoples by the English lies
in this very absence of a religious consciousness and of the guidance for conduct which
should flow from it—a lack common in our day to all nations East and West, from Japan to
England and America alike.”
―
Leo Tolstoy
“Historians are like deaf people who go on answering questions that no one has asked
them.”
―
Leo Tolstoy
“All is over...I have nothing but you, remember that.”
―
Leo Tolstoy
“We do not love people so much for the good they have done us, as for the good we do
them”
―
Leo Tolstoy
“Now that Vronsky had deceived her, she was prepared to love Levin and to hate Vronsky.”
―
Leo Tolstoy
“The most mentally deranged people are certainly those who see in others indications of
insanity they do not notice in themselves.”
―
Leo Tolstoy
“Every man, knowing to the smallest detail all the complexity of the conditions surrounding
him, involuntarily assumes that the complexity of these conditions and the difficulty of
comprehending them are only his personal, accidental peculiarity, and never thinks that others
are surrounded by the same complexity as he is.”
―
Leo Tolstoy
“We love people not so much for the good they've done us, as for the good we've done
them.”
―
Leo Tolstoy
“Power is the sum total of the wills of the mass, transfered by express or tactic agreement
to rulers chosen by the masses.”
―
Leo Tolstoy