“Our body is a machine for living. It is organized for that, it is its nature. Let life go on in it
unhindered and let it defend itself.”
―
Leo Tolstoy
“What I think about vivisection is that if people admit that they have the right to take or
endanger the life of living beings for the benefit of many, there will be no limit to their cruelty.”
―
Leo Tolstoy
“In Varenka, she realized that one has but to forget oneself and love others, and one will be
calm, happy, and noble.”
―
Leo Tolstoy
Everything that I know, I know only because I love.
―
Leo Tolstoy
“Well, what is that to me? I can't see her!" she cried.”
―
Leo Tolstoy
“My brother's death: wise, good, serious, he fell ill while still a young man, suffered for more
than a year, and died painfully, not understanding why he had lived and still less why he had
to die. No theories could give me, or him, any reply to these questions during his slow and
painful dying.”
―
Leo Tolstoy
“A man's every action is inevitably conditioned by what surrounds him and by his own
body.”
―
Leo Tolstoy
“Between Countess Nordston and Levin there had been established those relations, not
infrequent in society, in which two persons, while ostensibly remaining on friendly terms, are
contemptuous of each other to such a degree that they cannot even treat each other seriously
and cannot even insult each one another.”
―
Leo Tolstoy
“Man must not check reason by tradition, but contrariwise, must check tradition by reason.”
―
Leo Tolstoy
“No one is satisfied with his position, but every one is satisfied with his wit”
―
Leo Tolstoy
“Ivan Ilych's life had been most simple and most ordinary and therefore most terrible.”
―
Leo Tolstoy
“He [Vronsky] himself felt that, except that crazy fellow married to Kitty Shcherbatsky, who,
quite irrelevantly had with rabid virulence told him a lot of pointless nonsense, every nobleman
whose acquaintance he had made had become his partisan.”
―
Leo Tolstoy
“Therefore, all these causes-billions of causes-coincided so as to bring about what
happened. And consequently none of them was the exclusive cause of the event, but the
event had to take place simply because it had to take place.”
―
Leo Tolstoy
“I simply want to live; to cause no evil to anyone but myself.”
―
Leo Tolstoy
“The march of humanity, springing as it does from an infinite multitude of individual wills, is
continuous.”
―
Leo Tolstoy