“Here I am alive, and it's not my fault, so I have to try and get by as best I can without
hurting anybody until death takes over.”
―
Leo Tolstoy
“All were happy -- plants, birds, insects and children. But grown-up people -- adult men and
women -- never left off cheating and tormenting themselves and one another. It was not this
spring morning which they considered sacred and important, not the beauty of God's world,
given to all creatures to enjoy -- a beauty which inclines the heart to peace, to harmony and to
love.”
―
Leo Tolstoy
“The story of Ivan Ilyich life was of the simplest, most ordinary and therefore most terrible".
Tolstoy defines living an ordinary life as terrible - I really do have to agree!”
―
Leo Tolstoy
“According to the biblical tradition the absence of work -- idleness -- was a condition of the
first man's state of blessedness before the Fall. The love of idleness has been preserved in
fallen man, but now a heavy curse lies upon him, not only because we have to earn our bread
by the sweat of our brow, but also because our sense of morality will not allow us to be both
idle and at ease. Whenever we are idle a secret voice keeps telling us to feel guilty. If man
could discover a state in which he could be idle and still feel useful and on the path of duty, he
would have regained one aspect of that primitive state of blessedness. And there is one such
state of enforced and irreproachable idleness enjoyed by an entire class of men -- the military
class. It is this state of enforced and irreproachable idleness that forms the chief attraction of
military service, and it always will.
―
Leo Tolstoy
“They say that that's a difficult task, that nothing's amusing that isn't spiteful," he began with
a smile. "But I'll try. Get me a subject. It all lies in the subject. If a subject's given me, it's easy
to spin something round it. I often think that the celebrated talkers of the last century would
have found it difficult to talk cleverly now. Everything clever is so stale... ”
―
Leo Tolstoy
“It is often said that the invention of terrible weapons of destruction will put an end to war.
That is an error. As the means of extermination are improved, the means of reducing men whohold the state conception of life to submission can be improved to correspond. They may
slaughter them by thousands, by millions, they may tear them to pieces, still they will march to
war like senseless cattle. Some will want beating to make them move, others will be proud to
go if they are allowed to wear a scrap of ribbon or gold lace.”
―
Leo Tolstoy
“He soon felt that the realization of his longing gave him only one grain of the mountain of
bliss he had anticipated. That realization showed him the eternal error men make by imagining
that happiness consists in the gratification of their wishes.”
―
Leo Tolstoy
“One of the commonest and most generally accepted delusions is that every man can be
qualified in some particular way -- said to be kind, wicked, stupid, energetic, apathetic, and so
on. People are not like that. We may say of a man that he is more often kind than cruel, more
often wise than stupid, more often energetic than apathetic or vice versa; but it could never be
true to say of one man that he is kind or wise, and of another that he is wicked or stupid. Yet
we are always classifying mankind in this way. And it is wrong. Human beings are like rivers;
the water is one and the same in all of them but every river is narrow in some places, flows
swifter in others; here it is broad, there still, or clear, or cold, or muddy or warm. It is the same
with men. Every man bears within him the germs of every human quality, and now manifests
one, now another, and frequently is quite unlike himself, while still remaining the same man.”
―
Leo Tolstoy
“There had been in his past, as in every man's, actions, recognized by him as bad, for
which his conscience ought to have tormented him; but the memory of these evil actions was
far from causing him so much suffering as those trivial but humiliating reminiscences.”
―
Leo Tolstoy
“Though men in their hundreds of thousands had tried their hardest to disfigure that little
corner of the earth where they had crowded themselves together, paving the ground with
stones so that nothing could grow, weeding out every blade of vegetation, filling the air with
the fumes of coal and gas, cutting down trees and driving away every beast and every bird --
spring, however, was still spring, even in the town. The sun shone warm, the grass, wherever
it had not been scraped away, revived and showed green not only on the narrow strips of lawn
on the boulevards but between the paving-stones as well, and the birches, the poplars and the
wild cherry-trees were unfolding their sticky, fragrant leaves, and the swelling buds were
bursting on the lime trees; the jackdaws, the sparrows and the pigeons were cheerfully getting
their nests ready for the spring, and the flies, warmed by the sunshine, buzzed gaily along the
walls. All were happy -- plants, birds, insects and children. But grown-up people -- adult men
and women -- never left off cheating and tormenting themselves and one another. It was not
this spring morning which they considered sacred and important, not the beauty of God's
world, given to all creatures to enjoy -- a beauty which inclines the heart to peace, to harmony
and to love. No, what they considered sacred and important were their own devices for
wielding power over each other.”
―
Leo Tolstoy
“He stepped down, avoiding any long look at her as one avoids long looks at the sun, but
seeing her as one sees the sun, without looking.”
―
Leo Tolstoy
“At school he had done things which had formerly seemed to him very horrid and made him
feel disgusted with himself when he did them; but when later on he saw that such actions were
done by people of good position and that they did not regard them as wrong, he was able not
exactly to regard them as right, but to forget about them entirely or not be at all troubled at
remembering them.”
―
Leo Tolstoy
“Only people who are capable of loving strongly can also suffer great sorrow, but this same
necessity of loving serves to counteract their grief and heals them.”
―
Leo Tolstoy
“A man can spend several hours sitting cross-legged in the same position if he knows that
noting prevents him from changing it; but if he knows that he has to sit with his legs crossed
like that, he will get cramps, his legs will twitch and strain towards where he would like to
stretch them.”
―
Leo Tolstoy
“The example of a syllogism that he had studied in Kiesewetter's logic: Caius is a man, men
are mortal, therefore Caius is mortal, had throughout his whole life seemed to him right only in
relation to Caius, but not to him at all.”
―
Leo Tolstoy