“They had to return to the one sure and never-failing resource- slander.”
―
Leo Tolstoy
“In the name of God, stop a moment, cease your work, look around you.”
―
Leo Tolstoy
“Yes, love, ...but not the love that loves for something, to gain something, or because of
something, but that love that I felt for the first time, when dying, I saw my enemy and yet loved
him. I knew that feeling of love which is the essence of the soul, for which no object is needed.
And I know that blissful feeling now too. To love one's neighbours; to love one's enemies. To
love everything - to Love God in all His manifestations. Some one dear to one can be loved
with human love; but an enemy can only be loved with divine love. And that was why I felt
such joy when I felt that I loved that man. What happened to him? Is he alive? ...Loving with
human love, one may pass from love to hatred; but divine love cannot change. Nothing, not
even death, can shatter it. It is the very nature of the soul. And how many people I have hated
in my life. And of all people none I have loved and hated more than her.... If it were only
possible for me to see her once more... once, looking into those eyes to say...”
―
Leo Tolstoy
“after the murder of the duc there was one martyr more in heaven and one hero less on
earth”
―
Leo Tolstoy
“Why nowadays there's a new fashion every day.”
―
Leo Tolstoy
“You need feeling, emotion, to create. You can't create out of indifference.”
―
Leo Tolstoy
“To say that a work of art is good, but incomprehensible to the majority of men, is the same
as saying of some kind of food that it is very good but that most people can’t eat it.”
―
Leo Tolstoy
“Energy rests upon love; and come as it will, there's no forcing it.”
―
Leo Tolstoy
“In order to understand, observe, deduce, man must first be conscious of himself as alive. A
living man knows himself not otherwise than as wanting, that is, he is conscious of his will.
And his will, which constitutes the essence of his life, man is conscious of and cannot be
conscious of otherwise than as free.”
―
Leo Tolstoy
“The social conditions of life can only be improved by people exercising self-restraint.”
―
Leo Tolstoy
“He saw either death or the approach of it everywhere. But his undertaking now occupied
him all the more. He had to live his life to the end, until death came. Darkness covered
everything for him; but precisely because of this darkness he felt that his undertaking was the
only guiding thread in this darkness, and he seized it and held on to it with all his remaining
strength.”
―
Leo Tolstoy
“But perhaps it is always so, that men form their conceptions from fictitious, conventional
types, and then—all the combinations made—they are tired of the fictitious figures and begin
to invent more natural, true figures.”
―
Leo Tolstoy
“I wanted to run after him, but remembered that it is ridiculous to run after one's wife's lover
in one's socks; and I did not wish to be ridiculous but terrible.”
―
Leo Tolstoy
