“A little muzhik was working on the railroad, mumbling in his beard.
―
Leo Tolstoy
“And he has to live like this on the edge of destruction, alone, with nobody at all to
understand or pity him”
―
Leo Tolstoy
“The true meaning of Christ's teaching consists in the recognition of love as the supreme
law of life, and therefore not admitting any exceptions.”
―
Leo Tolstoy
“Rummaging in our souls, we often dig up something that ought to have lain there unnoticed. ”
―
Leo Tolstoy
“He had never thought the question over clearly, but vaguely imagined that his wife had
long suspected him of being unfaithful to her and was looking the other way. It even seemed
to him that she, a worn-out, aged, no longer beautiful woman, not remarkable for anything,
simple, merely a kind mother of a family, ought in all fairness to be indulgent. It turned out to
be quite the opposite.”
―
Leo Tolstoy
“Without knowing what I am and why I am here, life is impossible.”
―
Leo Tolstoy
“So that's what it is!" he suddenly exclaimed aloud. "What joy!”
―
Leo Tolstoy
“marveling at this boldness and ease in her presence, and not for one second losing sight
of her, though he did not look at her. He felt as though the sun were coming near him.”
―
Leo Tolstoy
“but that what was for him the greatest and most cruel injustice appeared to others a quite
ordinary occurrence.”
―
Leo Tolstoy
“I can never forget what is my whole life.”
―
Leo Tolstoy
“Everything I know, I know because I love.”
―
Leo Tolstoy
“As long as there are slaughter houses there will always be battlefields.”
―
Leo Tolstoy
“That one must either explain life to oneself so that it does not seem to be an evil mockery
by some sort of devil, or one must shoot oneself.”
―
Leo Tolstoy
In those days also people loved, envied, sought truth and virtue, and where carried away by
passions; and there was the same complex mental and moral life among the upper classes,
where were in some instances even more refined than now. If we have come to believe in the
perversity and coarse violence of that period, that is only because the traditions, memoirs,
stories, and novels that have been handed to us, record for the most part exceptional cases of
violence and brutality. To suppose that the predominant characteristic of that period was
turbulence, is as unjust as it would before a man, seeing nothing but the tops of trees beyond
a hill, to conclude that there was nothing to be found in that locality but trees.”
―
Leo Tolstoy
