“Writing laws is easy, but governing is difficult.”
―
Leo Tolstoy
“The main reason for the terrible cruelty between men today, apart from the absence
religion, is still the refined complexity of life which shields people from the consequences of
their actions. However cruel Attila, Genghis Khan and their followers may have been, the act
of killing people personally, face to face, must have been unpleasant: the wailing relatives and
the presence of the corpses. And thus their cruelty was restrained. Nowadays we kill people
through such a complex process of communication, and the consequences of our cruelty are
so carefully removed and concealed from us, that there is no restraint on the bestiality of the
action.”
―
Leo Tolstoy
“I felt that what I had been standing on had collapsed and that I had nothing left under my
feet. What I had lived on no longer existed, and there was nothing left.
―
Leo Tolstoy
“Respect was invented to cover the empty place where love should be.”
―
Leo Tolstoy
“In spite of death, he felt the need of life and love. He felt that love saved him from despair,
and that this love, under the menace of despair, had become still stronger and purer. The one
mystery of death, still unsolved, had scarcely passed before his eyes, when another mystery
had arisen, as insoluble, urging him to love and to life.”
―
Leo Tolstoy
“We imagine that when we are thrown out of our usual ruts all is lost, but it is only then that
what is new and good begins. While there is life there is happiness. There is much, much
before us.”
―
Leo Tolstoy
“And so liberalism had become a habit of Stepan Arkadyevitch's, and he liked his
newspaper, as he did his cigar after dinner, for the slight fog it diffused in his brain.”
―
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
“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
“The pleasure lies not in discovering truth, but in searching for it.”
―
Leo Tolstoy
“But neither of them dared speak of it, and not having expressed the one thing that
occupied their thoughts, whatever they said rang false.”
―
Leo Tolstoy
“Sometimes she did not know what she feared, what she desired: whether she feared or
desired what had been or what would be, and precisely what she desired, she did not know.”
―
Leo Tolstoy
“Every man experiences what you call love for every pretty woman and least of all for his
wife. That is what the proverb says, and it is a true one. "Another's wife is a swan, but one's
own is bitter wormwood.”
―
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
“I'll get angry in the same way with the coachman Ivan, argue in the same way, speak my
mind inappropriately, there will be the same wall between my soul's holy of holies and other
people, even my wife, I'll accuse her in the same way of my own fear and then regret it, I'll fail
in the same way to understand with my reason why I pray, and yet I will pray--but my life now,
my whole life, regardless of all that may happen to me, every minute of it, is not only not
meaningless, as it was before, but has the unquestionable meaning of the good which it is in
my power to put into it!”
―
Leo Tolstoy
