“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
“And so there was no single cause for war, but it happened simply because it had to
happen”
―
Leo Tolstoy
“He had lived (without being aware of it) on those spiritual truths that he had sucked in with
his mother's milk, but he had thought, not merely without recognition of these truths, but
studiously ignoring them. ”
―
Leo Tolstoy
“The Lord had given them the day and the Lord had given them the strength. And the day
and the strength had been dedicated to labor, and the labor was its reward. Who was the labor
for? What would be its fruits? These were irrelevant and idle questions.”
―
Leo Tolstoy
“I don't allow myself to doubt myself even for a moment.”
―
Leo Tolstoy
“Whatever our fate is or may be, we have made it and do not complain of it."
―
Leo Tolstoy
“The animalism of the brute nature in man is disgusting,” he thought, “but as long as it
remains in its naked form we observe it from the height of our spiritual life and despise it;
and—whether one has fallen or resisted—one remains what one was before. But when that
same animalism hides under a cloak of poetry and æsthetic feeling and demands our
worship—then we are swallowed up by it completely and worship animalism, no longer
distinguishing good from evil. Then it is awful!”
―
Leo Tolstoy
“They had supper and went away, and Ivan Ilyich was left alone with the consciousness
that his life was poisoned and was poisoning the lives of others, and that this poison did not
weaken but penetrated more and more deeply into his whole being.
―
Leo Tolstoy
“All the variety, all the charm, all the beauty of life are made up of light and shade.”
―
Leo Tolstoy
“Between Countess Nordston and Levin there had been established those relations, not
infrequent in society, in which two persons, while ostensibly remaining on friendly terms, are
contemptuous of each other to such a degree that they cannot even treat each other seriously
and cannot even insult each one another.”
―
Leo Tolstoy
“the same question arose in every soul: "For what, for whom, must I kill and be killed?"
―
Leo Tolstoy
“Her eyes, always sad, now looked into the mirror with particular hopelessness. "She's
flattering me," thought the princess, and she turned away and went on reading. Julie, however,
was not flattering her friend: indeed, the princess's eyes, large, deep, and luminous
(sometimes it was as if rays of light came from them in sheaves), were so beautiful that very
often, despite the unattractiveness of the whole face, those eyes were more attractive than
beauty. But the princess had never seen the good expression of thise eyes, the expression
they had in moments when she was not thinking of herself. As with all people, the moment she
looked in the mirror, her face assumed a strained, unnatural, bad expression.”
―
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
“Never, never marry, my friend. Here’s my advice to you: don’t marry until you can tell
yourself that you’ve done all you could, and until you’ve stopped loving the woman you’ve
chosen, until you see her clearly, otherwise you’ll be cruelly and irremediably mistaken. Marry
when you’re old and good for nothing...Otherwise all that’s good and lofty in you will be lost.”
―
Leo Tolstoy
