“You need feeling, emotion, to create. You can't create out of indifference.”
―
Leo Tolstoy
“Anything is better than lies and deceit!
―
Leo Tolstoy
“I wrote everything into Anna Karenina, and nothing was left over.”
―
Leo Tolstoy
“True life is lived when tiny changes occur.”
―
Leo Tolstoy
“Everything I know, I know because I love.”
―
Leo Tolstoy
“Occasionally she glanced at him, asking with her glance, 'Is this what I think?' "I
understand,' she said, blushing. "What is this word?' he said, pointing to the "n' that signified
the word "never." .... She wrote: t, I, c,g,n,o,a.”
―
Leo Tolstoy
“It was long before I could believe that human learning had no clear answer to this question.
For a long time it seemed to me, as I listened to the gravity and seriousness wherewith
Science affirmed its positions on matters unconnected with the problem of life, that I must
have misunderstood something. For a long time I was timid in the presence in learning, and I
fancied that the insufficiency of the answers which I received was not its fault, but was owing
to my own gross ignorance, but this thing was not a joke or a pastime with me, but the
business of my life, and I was at last forced, willy-nilly, to the conclusion that these questions
of mine were the only legitimate questions underlying all knowledge, and that it was not I that
was in fault in putting them, but science in pretending to have an answer for them.”
―
Leo Tolstoy
“And the light by which she had read the book filled with troubles, falsehoods, sorrow, and
evil, flared up more brightly than ever before, lighted up for her all that had been in darkness,
flickered, began to grow dim, and was quenched forever.”
―
Leo Tolstoy
“Not one word, not one gesture of yours shall I, could I, ever forget...”
―
Leo Tolstoy
“A wife's a worry, a non-wife's even worse.”
―
Leo Tolstoy
“The more is given the less the people will work for themselves, and the less they work the
more their poverty will increase.”
―
Leo Tolstoy
“Formerly...when he tried to do anything for the good of everybody, for humanity...for the
whole village, he had noticed that the thoughts of it were agreeable, but the activity itself was
always unsatisfactory; there was no full assurance that the work was really necessary, and the
activity itself, which at first seemed so great, ever lessened and lessened till it vanished. But
now...when he began to confine himself more and more to living for himself, though he no
longer felt any joy at the thought of his activity, he felt confident that his work was necessary,
saw that it progressed far better than formerly, and that it was always growing more and
more.”
―
Leo Tolstoy
“In order to undertake anything in family life, it is necessary that there be either complete
discord between the spouses or loving harmony.”
―
Leo Tolstoy
“Life is too long to say anything definitely; always say perhaps.”
―
Leo Tolstoy
