“We expect rewards for goodness, and punishments for the bad things which we do. Often,
they are not immediately”
―
Leo Tolstoy
“A little muzhik was working on the railroad, mumbling in his beard.
―
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
“Therein is the whole business of one’s life; to seek out and save in the soul that which is
perishing.”
―
Leo Tolstoy
“They haven’t an idea what happiness is; they don’t know that without our love, for us there
is neither happiness nor unhappiness—no life at all”
―
Leo Tolstoy
“With all my soul I longed to be in a position to join with the people in performing the rites of
their faith, but I could not do it. I felt that I would be lying to myself, mocking what was sacred
to me, if I were to go through with it.”
―
Leo Tolstoy
“Stepan Arkadyevitch had not chosen his political opinions or his views; these political
opinions and views had come to him of themselves, just as he did not choose the shapes of
his hat and coat, but simply took those that were being worn. ”
―
Leo Tolstoy
“In the midst of winter, I find within me the invisible summer...”
―
Leo Tolstoy
“In the name of God, stop a moment, cease your work, look around you.”
―
Leo Tolstoy
“The vocation of every man and woman is to serve people. ”
―
Leo Tolstoy
“What she did not know, and would never have believed, was that though her soul seemed
to have been grown over with an impenetrable layer of mould, some delicate blades of grass,
young and tender, were already pushing their way upwards, destined to take root and sendout living shoots so effectively that her all-consuming grief would soon be lost and forgotten.
The wound was healing from inside.”
―
Leo Tolstoy
“Universal military service may be compared to the efforts of a man to prop up his falling
house who so surrounds it and fills it with props and buttresses and planks and scaffolding
that he manages to keep the house standing only by making it impossible to live in it.”
―
Leo Tolstoy
“But every acquisition that is disproportionate to the labor spent on it is dishonest.”
―
Leo Tolstoy
“He was fond of angling, and seemed proud of being able to like such a stupid occupation.”
―
Leo Tolstoy
