“The question of how things will settle down is the only important question...”
―
Leo Tolstoy
“I always loved you, and if one loves anyone, one loves the whole person, just as they are and
not as one would like them to be. -Dolly
―
Leo Tolstoy
“He was not to blame for being born with an irrepressible charachter and a mind some how
constrained.”
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Leo Tolstoy
“He went down trying not to look long at her, as though she were the sun, but he saw her, as
one sees the sun, without looking.”
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Leo Tolstoy
“To educate the peasantry, three things are needed: schools, schools and schools.”
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Leo Tolstoy
“Rummaging in our souls, we often dig up something that ought to have lain there unnoticed. ”
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Leo Tolstoy
“In the best, the friendliest and simplest relations flattery or praise is necessary, just as
grease is necessary to keep wheels turning.
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Leo Tolstoy
“A wife's a worry, a non-wife's even worse.”
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Leo Tolstoy
“Pierre's insanity consisted in the fact that he did not wait, as before, for personal reasons,
which he called people's merits, in order to love them, but love overflowed his heart, and,
loving people without reason, he discovered the unquestionable reasons for which it was
worth loving them”
―
Leo Tolstoy
“Just when the question of how to live had become clearer to him, a new insoluble problem
presented itself - Death.”
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Leo Tolstoy
“It would be a sin to help you destroy yourself.”
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Leo Tolstoy
“Suppose a problem in psychology was set: What can be done to persuade the men of our
time — Christians, humanitarians or, simply, kindhearted people — into committing the most
abominable crimes with no feeling of guilt? There could be only one way: to do precisely what
is being done now, namely, to make them governors, inspectors, officers, policemen, and so
forth; which means, first, that they must be convinced of the existence of a kind of organization
called ‘government service,’ allowing men to be treated like inanimate objects and banningthereby all human brotherly relations with them; and secondly, that the people entering this
‘government service’ must be so unified that the responsibility for their dealings with men
would never fall on any one of them individually.”
―
Leo Tolstoy
“As it was before, so it was now; I need only be aware of God to live; I need only forget
Him, or disbelieve Him, and I died.
What is this animation and dying? I do not live when I lose 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. “What more do you seek?” exclaimed a voice within me.
“This is He. He is that without which one cannot live. To know God and to live is one and the
same thing. God is life.”
“Live seeking God, and then you will not live without God.” And more than ever before, all
within me and around me lit up, and the light did not again abandon me.”
―
Leo Tolstoy
“[Pierre] involuntarily started comparing these two men, so different and at the same time
so similar, because of the love he had for both of them, and because both had lived and both
had died.”
―
Leo Tolstoy