“Seize the moments of happiness, love and be loved! That is the only reality in the world, all
else is folly. It is the one thing we are interested in here.”
―
Leo Tolstoy
“We expect rewards for goodness, and punishments for the bad things which we do. Often,
they are not immediately”
―
Leo Tolstoy
“Love hinders death. Love is life. All, everything that I understand, I understand because I
love. Everything is united by it alone. Love is God, and to die means that I, a particle of love,
shall return to the general and eternal source." These thoughts seemed to him comforting. But
they were only thoughts. Something was lacking in them, they were not clear, they were too
one-sidedly personal and brain-spun. And there was the former agitation and obscurity.”
―
Leo Tolstoy
“No matter when, at whatever moment, if she were asked what she was thinking about she
could reply quite correctly - one thing, her happiness and her unhappiness.”
―
Leo Tolstoy
“The very nastiest and coarsest, I can't tell you. It is not grief, not dullness, but much worse.
It is as if all that was good in me had hidden itself, and only what is horrid remains.
―
Leo Tolstoy
“A commercial company enslaved a nation comprising two hundred millions. Tell this to a
man free from superstition and he will fail to grasp what these words mean. What does it mean
that thirty thousand men, not athletes but rather weak and ordinary people, have subdued two
hundred million vigorous, clever, capable, and freedom-loving people?”
―
Leo Tolstoy
“Everything I know, I know because of love”
―
Leo Tolstoy
“I did not myself know what I wanted: I feared life, desired to escape from it, yet still hoped
something of it.”
―
Leo Tolstoy
“And he has to live like this on the edge of destruction, alone, with nobody at all to
understand or pity 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
“When one's head is gone one doesn't weep over one's hair!”
―
Leo Tolstoy
“My writing is like those little carved baskets made in prisons...”
―
Leo Tolstoy
“You can love a person dear to you with a human love, but an enemy can only be loved with
divine love.”
―
Leo Tolstoy
“Art is not a handicraft; it is the transmission of feeling the artist has experienced.
―
Leo Tolstoy
“I can't praise a young lady who is alive only when people are admiring her, but as soon as
she is left alone, collapses and finds nothing to her taste--one who is all for show and has no
resources in herself”
―
Leo Tolstoy
