“All, everything that I understand, I understand only because I love.”
―
Leo Tolstoy
“We know that man has the faculty of becoming completely absorbed in a subject however
trivial it may be, and that there is no subject so trivial that it will not grow to infinite proportions
if one's entire attention is devoted to it.”
―
Leo Tolstoy
“As long as there are slaughter houses there will always be battlefields.”
―
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
“It's wrong, what you say, and I beg you, if you're a good man, to forget what you've said, as I
forget it," she said at last.
―
Leo Tolstoy
“Historians are like deaf people who go on answering questions that no one has asked
them.”
―
Leo Tolstoy
“A quiet secluded life in the country, with the possibility of being useful to people to whom it
is easy to do good, and who are not accustomed to have it done to them; then work which one
hopes may be of some use; then rest, nature, books, music, love for one’s neighbor — such is
my idea of happiness.”
―
Leo Tolstoy
“excuse me' he added, taking the opera glasses out of her hands and looking over her bare
shoulder at the row of boxes opposite, 'i'm afraid i'm becoming ridiculous
―
Leo Tolstoy
“The march of humanity, springing as it does from an infinite multitude of individual wills, is
continuous.”
―
Leo Tolstoy
“We should always try to find those things which do not separate us from other people but
which unite us. To work against each other, to be angry and turn your back on each other, is
to work against nature. —MARCUS AURELIUS”
―
Leo Tolstoy
“It is impossible for there to be a person with no religion (i.e. without any kind of relationship
to the world) as it is for there to be a person without a heart. He may not know that he has a
religion, just as a person may not know that he has a heart, but it is no more possible for a
person to exist without a religion than without a heart.”
―
Leo Tolstoy
“All families are happy, all families are alike.”
―
Leo Tolstoy
“She was utterly unlike what she had been when he first saw her. Both morally and
physically she had changed for the worse. [...] 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.”
―
Leo Tolstoy
“What is to be done? There was no solution, but the universal solution which life gives to all
questions, even the most complex and insoluble. The answer is: one must live in the needs of
the day -- that is, forget oneself.”
―
Leo Tolstoy