“Why, of course," objected Stepan Arkadyevitch. "But that's just the aim of civilization—to
make everything a source of enjoyment.”
―
Leo Tolstoy
"Why, whatever loathsome thoughts can you have?" asked Dolly, smiling.
―
Leo Tolstoy
“And what is justice? The princess thought of that proud word 'justice'. All the complex laws
of man centered for her in one clear and simple law—the law of love and self-sacrifice taught
us by Him who lovingly suffered for mankind though He Himself was God. What had she to do
with justice or injustice of other people? She had to endure and love, and that she did.”
―
Leo Tolstoy
“Luxury cannot be obtained other than by enslaving other people.”
―
Leo Tolstoy
“With friends, one is well; but at home, one is better.”
―
Leo Tolstoy
“Self-conceit is a sentiment entirely incompatible with genuine sorrow, and it is so firmly
engrafted on human nature that even the most profound sorrow can seldom expel it
altogether. Vanity in sorrow expresses itself by a desire to appear either stricken with grief or
unhappy or brave: and this ignoble desire which we do not acknowledge but which hardly ever
leaves us even in the deepest trouble robs our grief of its strength, dignity and sincerity.”
―
Leo Tolstoy
“Error is the force that welds men together; truth is communicated to men only by deeds of
truth.
―
Leo Tolstoy
“In the past he had been unable to see the great, teh unfathomable, the infinite, in anything.
He had only felt that it must exist somewhere and had been seeking it. In everything near and
comprehensible he had seen only what was limited, petty, commonplace, and meaningless.
He had equipped himself with a mental telescope and gazed into the distance where the
distance had seemed to him great and infinite only because they were not clearly visible. Such
had Europan life, politics, Masonry, philosophy, and philanthropy seemed to him. Bet even
then, at moments of weakness as he had accounted them, his mind had penetrated that
distance too, and he had seen there the same triviality, worldliness, and absurdity.
―
Leo Tolstoy
“What's all this love of arguing? No one ever convinces anyone else.”
―
Leo Tolstoy
“Can it be that I have not lived as one ought?" suddenly came into his head. "But how not
so, when I've done everything as it should be done?”
―
Leo Tolstoy
“Our profession is dreadful, writing corrupts the soul.”
―
Leo Tolstoy
“Konstantin Levin did not like talking and hearing about the beauty of nature. Words for him
took away the beauty of what he saw.”
―
Leo Tolstoy
“A free thinker used to be a man who had been educated on ideas of religion, law, morality,
and had arrived at free thought by virtue of his own struggle and toil; but now a new type of
born freethinker has been appearing, who’ve never even heard that there have been laws of
morality and religion, and that there are authorities, but who simply grow up with negative
ideas about everything, that is savages.”
―
Leo Tolstoy
“He looked at her as a man looks at a faded flower he has gathered, with difficulty
recognizing in it the beauty for which he picked and ruined it. And in spite of this he felt that
then, when his love was stronger, he could, if he had greatly wished it, have torn that love out
of his heart; but now when as at that moment it seemed to him he felt no love for her, he knew
that what bound him to her could not be broken.”
―
Leo Tolstoy
“The shore was God, the stream was tradition, and the oars were the free will given to me
to make it to the shore where I would be joined with God. Thus the force of life was renewed
within me, and I began to live once again.”
―
Leo Tolstoy
