“[Pierre] involuntarily started comparing these two men, so different and at the same time so similar, because of the love he had for both of them, and because both had lived and both had died.”

Leo Tolstoy

“I think love, both kinds of love, which you remember Plato defines in his "Symposium" - both kinds of love serve a touchstone for men. Some men understand only the one, some only the other. Those who understand only the non-platonic love need not speak of tragedy. For such love there can be no tragedy. "Thank you kindly for the pleasure, good bye," and that's the whole tragedy. And for the platonic love there can be no tragedy either, because there everything is clear and pure.”

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

“Now one often saw only her face and body, while her soul was not seen at all.”

Leo Tolstoy

“Yet time and again, from different approaches, I kept coming to the same conclusion, that I could not have come into the world without any cause, reason, or meaning; that I could not be the fledgeling fallen from the nest that I felt myself to be. If I lie on my back crying in the tall grass, like a fledgeling, it is because I know that my mother brought me into the world, kept me warm, fed me and loved me. But where is she, that mother? If I am abandoned, then who has abandoned me? I cannot hide myself from the fact that someone who loved me gave birth to me. Who is this someone? Again, God.”

Leo Tolstoy

“But our idea is that the wolves should be fed and the sheep kept safe. ”

Leo Tolstoy

“Smiling with pleasure, they went through their memories, not sad, old people's memories, but poetic, youthful ones, those impressions from the very distant past where dream merges with reality, and they laughed softly, rejoicing at something.”

Leo Tolstoy

“Man lives consciously for himself, but serves as an unconscious instrument for the achievement of historical, universally human goals. ”

Leo Tolstoy

“He disliked contradiction, and still more, arguments that were continually skipping from one thing to another, introducing new and disconnected points, so that there was no knowing to which to reply.

Leo Tolstoy

“On earth, here on this earth, there is no truth, all is false and evil; but in the universe, in the whole universe there is a kingdom of truth, and we who are now the children of earth are— eternally—children of the whole universe. Don’t I feel in my soul that I am part of this vast harmonious whole? Don’t I feel that I form one link, one step, between the lower and higher beings, in this vast harmonious multitude of beings in whom the Deity—the Supreme Power if you prefer the term—is manifest? If I see, clearly see, that ladder leading from plant to man, why should i suppose it breaks off at me and does not go father and father? I feel that I cannot vanish, since nothing vanishes in this world, but that I shall always exist and always have existed. I feel that beyond me and above me there are spirits, and that in this world there is truth”

Leo Tolstoy

“Am I mad, to see what others do not see, or are they mad who are responsible for all that I am seeing?”

Leo Tolstoy

“What a strange illusion it is to suppose that beauty is goodness.

Leo Tolstoy

“The chief reason why the prince was so particularly disagreeable to Vronsky was that he could not help seeing himself in him. And what he saw in this mirror did not gratify his self- esteem. He was a very stupid and very self-satisfied and very healthy and very well-washed man, and nothing else... He was equable and not cringing with his superiors, was free and ingratiating in his behavior with his equals, and was contemptuously indulgent with his inferiors... for this prince he was an inferior, and his contemptuous and indulgent attitude to him revolted him.”

Leo Tolstoy

“What counts in making a happy marriage is not so much how compatible you are but how you deal with incompatibility.

Leo Tolstoy

“You've said nothing, of course, and I ask nothing," he was saying; "but you know that friendship's not what I want: that there's only one happiness in life for me, that word that you dislike so...yes, love!...”

Leo Tolstoy


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