“Anna Arkadyevna read and understood, but it was distasteful to her to read, that is, to
follow the reflection of other people’s lives. She had too great a desire to live herself. If she
read that the heroine of the novel was nursing a sick man, she longed to move with noiseless
steps about the room of a sick man; if she read of a member of Parliament making a speech,
she longed to be delivering the speech; if she read of how Lady Mary had ridden after the
hounds, and had provoked her sister-in-law, and had surprised everyone by her boldness, she
too wished to be doing the same. But there was no chance of doing anything; and twisting the
smooth paper knife in her little hands, she forced herself to read.”
―
Leo Tolstoy
“The most difficult subjects can be explained to the most slow-witted man if he has not
formed any idea of them already; but the simplest thing cannot be made clear to the most
intelligent man if he is firmly persuaded that he knows already, without a shadow of doubt,
what is laid before him.”
―
Leo Tolstoy
“How can he talk like that?" thought Pierre. He considered his friend a model of perfection
because Prince Andrew possessed in the highest degree just the very qualities Pierre lacked,
and which might be best described as strength of will.”
―
Leo Tolstoy
“But the princess had never seen the beautiful expression of her eyes; the expression that
came into them when she was not thinking of herself. As is the case with everyone, her face
assumed an affected, unnatural, ugly expression as soon as she looked in the looking glass.”
―
Leo Tolstoy
“I do not live when I loose belief in the existence of God. I should long ago have killed
myself had I not had a dim hope of finding Him. I live really live only when I feel him and seek
Him”
―
Leo Tolstoy
“but my life now, my whole life apart from anything that can happen to me, every minute of
it is no more meaningless, as it was before, but it has the positive meaning of goodness, which
I have the power to put into it.”
―
Leo Tolstoy
“The question of how things will settle down is the only important question...”
―
Leo Tolstoy
“Pay bad people with your goodness; fight their hatred with your kindness. Even if you do
not achieve victory over other people, you will conquer yourself. —HENRI AMIEL”
―
Leo Tolstoy
“Count Lev Nikolayevich Tolstoy, commonly referred to in English as Leo Tolstoy, was a
Russian novelist, writer, essayist, philosopher, Christian anarchist, pacifist, educational
reformer, moral thinker, and an influential member of the Tolstoy family. As a fiction writer
Tolstoy is widely regarded as one of the greatest of all novelists, particularly noted for his
masterpieces War and Peace and Anna Karenina; in their scope, breadth and realistic
depiction of Russian life, the two books stand at the peak of realistic fiction. As a moral
philosopher he was notable for his ideas on nonviolent resistance through his work The
Kingdom of God is Within You, which in turn influenced such twentieth-century figures as
Mohandas K. Gandhi and Martin Luther King, Jr. Source: Wikipedia”
―
Leo Tolstoy
“Then we should find some artificial inoculation against love, as with smallpox. ”
―
Leo Tolstoy
“How can one be well...when one suffers morally?”
―
Leo Tolstoy
“Pierre looked into the sky, into the depths of the retreating, twinkling stars. "And all this is
mine, and all this is in me, and all this is me!" thought Pierre. "And all this they've caught and
put in a shed and boarded it up!”
―
Leo Tolstoy
“A wife's a worry, a non-wife's even worse.”
―
Leo Tolstoy
“We are all brothers, but I live on a salary paid me for prosecuting, judging, and
condemning the thief or the prostitute whose existence the whole tenor of my life brings
about...We are all brothers, but I live on the salary I gain by collecting taxes from needy
laborers to be spent on the luxuries of the rich and idle. We are all brothers, but I take a
stipend for preaching a false Christian religion, which I do not myself believe in, and which
only serves to hinder men from understanding true Christianity.”
―
Leo Tolstoy
“But I'm glad you'll see me as I am. Above all, I wouldn't want people to think that I want to
prove anything. I don't want to prove anything, I just want to live; to cause no evil to anyone
but myself. I have that right, haven't I?”
―
Leo Tolstoy
