“One can live magnificently in this world if one knows how to work and how to love.”
―
Leo Tolstoy
“So you see,' said Stepan Arkadyich, 'you're a very wholesome man. That is your virtue and
your defect. You have a wholesome character, and you want all of life to be made up of
wholesome phenomena, but that doesn't happen. So you despise the activity of public service
because you want things always to correspond to their aim, and that doesn't happen. You also
want the activity of the individual man always to have an aim, that love and family life always
be one. And that doesn't happen. All the variety, all the charm, all the beauty of life are made
up of light and shade.”
―
Leo Tolstoy
“He was not to blame for being born with an irrepressible charachter and a mind some how
constrained.”
―
Leo Tolstoy
“We exchanged disagreeable remarks. The impression of this first quarrel was terrible. I say
quarrel, but the term is inexact. It was the sudden discovery of the abyss that had been dug
between us.”
―
Leo Tolstoy
Pure, perfect sorrow is as impossible as pure and perfect joy.”
―
Leo Tolstoy
“Life is too long to say anything definitely; always say perhaps.”
―
Leo Tolstoy
“There was no solution but that usual solution which life gives to all questions, even the
most complex and insoluble. That answer one must live in the needs of one that - that is,
forget oneself.”
―
Leo Tolstoy
“I felt that what I had been standing on had collapsed and that I had nothing left under my
feet. What I had lived on no longer existed, and there was nothing left.
―
Leo Tolstoy
“Every violent reform deserves censure, for it quite fails to remedy evil while men remain
what they are, and also because wisdom needs no violence.”
―
Leo Tolstoy
“Each time of life has its own kind of love.”
―
Leo Tolstoy
“I ask one thing: I ask the right to hope and suffer as I do now."
―
Leo Tolstoy
“I'm like a starving man who has been given food. Maybe he's cold, and his clothes are torn,
and he's ashamed, but he's not unhappy.”
―
Leo Tolstoy
“Well, what is that to me? I can't see her!" she cried.”
―
Leo Tolstoy
“All the diversity, all the charm, and all the beauty of life are made up of light and shade.”
―
Leo Tolstoy
“My writing is like those little carved baskets made in prisons...”
―
Leo Tolstoy
