“So that's what it is!" he suddenly exclaimed aloud. "What joy!”
―
Leo Tolstoy
“Love. The reason I dislike that word is that it means too much for me, far more than you can
understand."
―
Leo Tolstoy
“No, it's all the same to me," said Levin, unable to suppress a smile.”
―
Leo Tolstoy
“Happiness consists in always aspiring perfection, the pause in any level in perfection is the
pause of happiness”
―
Leo Tolstoy
“Was it through reason that I arrived at the necessity of loving my neighbor and not
throttling him?...Not reason. Reason discovered the struggle for existence and the law which
demands that everyone who hinders the satisfaction of my desires should be throttled. That is
the conclusion of reason. Reason could not discover love for the other, because it’s
unreasonable.”
―
Leo Tolstoy
"Not a word, not a movement of yours will I ever forget, nor can I...”
―
Leo Tolstoy
“Friends we shall never be, you know that yourself. Whether we shall be the happiest or the
wretchedest of people--that's in your hands.”
―
Leo Tolstoy
“Real science studies and makes accessible that knowledge which people at that period of
history think important, and real art transfers this truth from the domain of knowledge to the
domain of feelings.”
―
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
“Lay me down like a stone oh God, and raise me up like a new bread".
―
Leo Tolstoy
“The main reason for the terrible cruelty between men today, apart from the absence
religion, is still the refined complexity of life which shields people from the consequences of
their actions. However cruel Attila, Genghis Khan and their followers may have been, the act
of killing people personally, face to face, must have been unpleasant: the wailing relatives and
the presence of the corpses. And thus their cruelty was restrained. Nowadays we kill people
through such a complex process of communication, and the consequences of our cruelty are
so carefully removed and concealed from us, that there is no restraint on the bestiality of the
action.”
―
Leo Tolstoy
“everything comes in time to him who knows how to wait . . . there is nothing stronger than
these two: patience and time, they will do it all.”
―
Leo Tolstoy
“All families are happy, all families are alike.”
―
Leo Tolstoy
“Respect is an invention of people who want to cover up the empty place where love should
be.”
―
Leo Tolstoy
“Olenin always took his own path and had an unconscious objection to the beaten tracks.”
―
Leo Tolstoy
