“ٰ "The Most difficult thing but an essential one – is to love Life, to love it even while one
suffers, because Life is all, Life is God, and to love Life means to love God.”
―
Leo Tolstoy
“Happiness does not depend on outward things, but on the way we see them.”
―
Leo Tolstoy
“Life is everything. Life is God. Everything shifts and moves, and this movement is God.
And while there is life, there is delight in the self-awareness of the divinity. To love life is to
love God. The hardest and most blissful thing is to love this life in one's suffering, in the
guiltlessness of suffering.
―
Leo Tolstoy
“Anna had been preparing herself for this meeting, had thought what she would say to him,
but she did not succeed in saying anything of it; his passion mastered her. She tried to calm
him, to calm herself, but it was too late. His feeling infected her. Her lips trembled so that for a
long while she could say nothing."
"Yes, you have conquered me, and I am yours," she said at last, pressing his hands to her
bosom.
"So it had to be," he said. "So long as we live, it must be so. I know it now.”
―
Leo Tolstoy
“Davout looked up and gazed intently at him. For some seconds they looked at one
another, and that look saved Pierre. Apart from conditions of war and law, that look
established human relations between the two men. At that moment an immense number of
things passed dimly through both their minds, and they realized that they were both children of
humanity and were brothers.”
―
Leo Tolstoy
“In infinite time, in infinite matter, in infinite space, is formed a bubble organism, and that
bubble lasts a while and bursts, and that bubble is Me.”
―
Leo Tolstoy
“Death, the inevitable end of everything, confronted him for the first time with irresistible
force.
―
Leo Tolstoy
“The more mental effort he made the clearer he saw that it was undoubtedly so: that he had
really forgotten and overlooked one little circumstance in life - that Death would come and end
everything, so that it was useless to begin anything, and that there was no help for it, Yes it
was terrible but true”
―
Leo Tolstoy
“I don't allow myself to doubt myself even for a moment.”
―
Leo Tolstoy
“He meditated on the use to which he should put all the energy of youth which comes to a
man only once in life. Should he devote this power, which is not the strength of intellect or
heart or education, but an urge which once spent can never return, the power given to a man
once only to make himself, or even – so it seems to him at the time – the universe into
anything he wishes: should he devote it to art, to science, to love, or to practical activities?
True, there are people who never have this urge: at the outset of life they place their necks
under the first yoke that offers itself, and soberly toil away in it to the end of their days.”
―
Leo Tolstoy
“-Why are you so sad? Because you speak to me in words and I look at you with feelings.”
―
Leo Tolstoy
“It would be good," thought Prince Andrei, glancing at the little image that his sister had
hung around his neck with such reverence and emotion, "It would be good if everything were
as clear and simple as it seems to Princess Marya . How good it would be to know where to
seek help in this life, and what to expect after it, beyond the grave! How happy and at peace I
should be if I could now say:" Lord have mercy on me!... But to whom should I say this? To
some power--- indefinable and incomprehensible, to which I not only cannot appeal, but which
I cannot express in words---The Great All or Nothing," he said to himself, "or to that God who
has been sewn into this amulet by Marya? There is nothing certain, nothing except the
nothingness of everything that is comprehensible to me, and the greatness of something
incomprehensible but all important!”
―
Leo Tolstoy
“Levin was almost of the same age as Oblonsky; their intimacy did not rest merely on
champagne. Levin had been the friend and companion of his early youth. They were fond of
one another in spite of the difference of their characters and tastes, as friends are fond of one
another who have been together in early youth. But in spite of this, each of them—as is often
the way with men who have selected careers of different kinds—though in discussion he
would even justify the other's career, in his heart despised it. It seemed to each of them that
the life he led himself was the only real life, and the life led by his friend was a mere
phantasm. Oblonsky could not restrain a slight mocking smile at the sight of Levin. How often
he had seen him come up to Moscow from the country where he was doing something, but
what precisely Stepan Arkadyevitch could never quite make out, and indeed he took no
interest in the matter. Levin arrived in Moscow always excited and in a hurry, rather ill at ease
and irritated by his own want of ease, and for the most part with a perfectly new, unexpected
view of things. Stepan Arkadyevitch laughed at this, and liked it. In the same way Levin in his
heart despised the town mode of life of his friend, and his official duties, which he laughed at,
and regarded as trifling. But the difference was that Oblonsky, as he was doing the same as
every one did, laughed complacently and good-humoredly, while Levin laughed without
complacency and sometimes angrily.”
―
Leo Tolstoy
“To every administrator, in peaceful, unstormy times, it seems that the entire population
entrusted to him moves only by his efforts, and in this consciousness of his necessity every
administrator finds the chief rewards for his labors and efforts. It is understandable that, as
long as the historical sea is calm, it must seem to the ruler-administrator in his frail little bark,
resting his pole against the ship of the people and moving along with it, that his efforts are
moving the ship. But once a storm arises, the sea churns up, and the ship begins to move my
itself, and then the delusion is no longer possible. The ship follows its own enormous,
independent course, the pole does not reach the moving ship, and the ruler suddenly, from his
position of power, from being a source of strength, becomes an insignificant, useless, and
feeble human being.”
―
Leo Tolstoy
“There was no solution, save that universal solution which life gives to all questions, even
the most complex and insolvable: One must live in the needs of the day--that is, forget
oneself.”
―
Leo Tolstoy