“Art is the uniting of the subjective with the objective, of nature with reason, of the
unconscious with the conscious, and therefore art is the highest means of knowledge.”
―
Leo Tolstoy
“Whatever we may say about the soul going to the sky... we know there is no sky but only
an atmosphere.”
―
Leo Tolstoy
“I know now that people only seem to live when they care only for themselves, and that it is
by love for others that they really live. He who has Love has God in him, and is in God - -
because God is Love. ”
―
Leo Tolstoy
“Just when the question of how to live had become clearer to him, a new insoluble problem
presented itself - Death.”
―
Leo Tolstoy
“But to us of a later generation...it is inconceivable that millions of Christian men should
have killed and tortured each other, because Napoleon was ambitious, Alexander firm, English
policy crafty, and the Duke of Oldenburg hardly treated. We cannot grasp the connections
between these circumstances and the bare fact of murder and violence, nor why the duke's
wrongs should induce thousands of men from the other side of Europe to pillage and murder
the inhabitants of the Smolensk and Moscow provinces and to be slaughtered by them.”
―
Leo Tolstoy
“He felt now that he was not simply close to her, but that he did not know where he ended and
she began.”
―
Leo Tolstoy
“... for nightinggales - we know - can’t live on fairytales.”
―
Leo Tolstoy
“When a man sees a dying animal, horror comes over him: that which he himself is, his
essence, is obviously being annihilated before his eyes--is ceasing to be. But when the dying
one is a person, and a beloved person, then, besides a sense of horror at the annihilation of
life, there is a feeling of severance and a spiritual wound which, like a physical wound,
sometimes kills and sometimes heals, but always hurts and fears any external, irritating
touch.”
―
Leo Tolstoy
“A man on a thousand mile walk has to forget his goal and say to himself every morning,
'Today I'm going to cover twenty-five miles and then rest up and sleep.”
―
Leo Tolstoy
“To live in the needs of the day, find forgetfulness.”
―
Leo Tolstoy
“I have learned what must be, and therefore have come to see the whole horror of what is.”
―
Leo Tolstoy
“I work, I want to do something, but I had forgotten it must all end; I had forgotten--death.”
―
Leo Tolstoy
“And indeed, if Evgeny Irtenev was mentally ill, then all people are just as mentally ill, and
the most mentally ill are undoubtably those who see signs of madness in others that they do
not see in themselves.”
―
Leo Tolstoy
“It was necessary that millions of men in whose hands lay the real power -- the soldiers who
fired, or transported provisions and guns -- should consent to carry out the will of these weak
individuals...”
―
Leo Tolstoy
