“People often think the question of non-resistance to evil by force is a theoretical one, which
can be neglected. Yet this question is presented by life itself to all men, and calls for some
answer from every thinking man. Ever since Christianity has been outwardly professed, this
question is for men in their social life like the question which presents itself to a traveler when
the road on which he has been journeying divides into two branches.
He must go on and he cannot say: I will not think about it, but will go on just as I did before.
There was one road, now there are two, and he must make his choice.”
―
Leo Tolstoy
“Anna Arkadyevna read and understood, but it was distasteful to her to read, that it, to
follow the reflection of other people's lives. She had too great a desire to live herself.”
―
Leo Tolstoy
“The more mental effort he made the clearer he saw that it was undoubtedly so: that he had
really forgotten and overlooked one little circumstance in life - that Death would come and end
everything, so that it was useless to begin anything, and that there was no help for it, Yes it
was terrible but true”
―
Leo Tolstoy
“Every lie is a poison; there are no harmless lies. Only the truth is safe. Only the truth gives
me consolation - it is the one unbreakable diamond.”
―
Leo Tolstoy
“That only shows you have no heart,’ she said. But her eyes said that she knew he had a
heart, and that was why she was afraid of him”
―
Leo Tolstoy
“I sit on a man's back choking him and making him carry me, and yet assure myself and others
that i am sorry for him and wish to lighten his load by all means possible....except by getting
off his back.”
―
Leo Tolstoy
“To live in the needs of the day, find forgetfulness.”
―
Leo Tolstoy
“These joys were so trifling as to be as imperceptible as grains of gold among the sand, and
in moments of depression she saw nothing but the sand; yet there were brighter moments
when she felt nothing but joy, saw nothing but the gold.”
―
Leo Tolstoy
“Several times I asked myself, "Can it be that I have overlooked something, that there is
something which I have failed to understand? Is it not possible that this state of despair is
common to everyone?" And I searched for an answer to my questions in every area of
knowledge acquired by man. For a long time I carried on my painstaking search; I did not
search casually, out of mere curiosity, but painfully, persistently, day and night, like a dying
man seeking salvation. I found nothing.”
―
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
“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
“In everything, almost in everything, I wrote I was guided by the need of collecting ideas
which, linked together, would be the expression of myself, though each individual idea,
expressed separately in words, loses its meaning, is horribly debased when only one of the
links, of which it forms a part, is taken by itself. But the interlinking of these ideas is not, I think,
an intellectual process, but something else, and it is impossible to express the source of this
interlinking directly in words; it can only be done indirectly by describing images, actions, and
situations in words.”
―
Leo Tolstoy
“When you understand that you will die to-morrow, if not to-day, and nothing will be left,
then everything is so unimportant!... So one goes on living, amusing oneself with hunting, with
work - anything so as not think of death”
―
Leo Tolstoy
“Power is the sum total of the wills of the mass, transfered by express or tactic agreement
to rulers chosen by the masses.”
―
Leo Tolstoy
