“The only thing that we know is that we know nothing, and that is the highest flight of human
wisdom.”
―
Leo Tolstoy
“We should show life neither as it is or as it ought to be, but only as we see it in our
dreams.”
―
Leo Tolstoy
“Her eyes, always sad, now looked into the mirror with particular hopelessness. "She's
flattering me," thought the princess, and she turned away and went on reading. Julie, however,
was not flattering her friend: indeed, the princess's eyes, large, deep, and luminous
(sometimes it was as if rays of light came from them in sheaves), were so beautiful that very
often, despite the unattractiveness of the whole face, those eyes were more attractive than
beauty. But the princess had never seen the good expression of thise eyes, the expression
they had in moments when she was not thinking of herself. As with all people, the moment she
looked in the mirror, her face assumed a strained, unnatural, bad expression.”
―
Leo Tolstoy
“What energy!' I thought. 'Man has conquered everything, and destroyed millions of plants,
yet this one won't submit.”
―
Leo Tolstoy
“Millions of men, renouncing their human feelings and reason, had to go from west to east
to slay their fellows, just as some centuries previously hordes of men had come from the east
to the west slaying their fellows.”
―
Leo Tolstoy
“Reason is often the slave of sin; it strives to justify it.”
―
Leo Tolstoy
“I don't want to prove anything; I merely want to live, to do no one harm but myself. I have
the right to do that, haven't I?”
―
Leo Tolstoy
“Be bad, but at least don't be a liar, a deceiver!”
―
Leo Tolstoy
“He wanted and needed their love, but felt none towards them. He now had neither love nor
humility nor purity”
―
Leo Tolstoy
“I simply want to live; to cause no evil to anyone but myself.”
―
Leo Tolstoy
“The vocation of every man and woman is to serve people. ”
―
Leo Tolstoy
“Only by taking infinitesimally small units for observation (the differential of history, that is,
the individual tendencies of men) and attaining to the art of integrating them (that is, finding
the sum of these infinitesimals) can we hope to arrive at the laws of history.”
―
Leo Tolstoy
“Without knowing what I am and why I am here, life is impossible.”
―
Leo Tolstoy
