“But live while you live, tomorrow you die...”
―
Leo Tolstoy
“One step across the dividing line, so like the one between the living and the dead and you
enter an unknown world of suffering and death. What will you find there? Who will be there?
There, just just beyond the field, that tree, that sunlit roof? No one knows, and yet you want to
know. You dread crossing that line, and yet you want to cross it. You know sooner or later you
will have to go across and find out what is there beyond it, just as you must inevitably found
out what lies beyond death. Yet here you are, fit and strong, carefree and excited, with men all
around you just the same- strong, excited and full of life.' This is what all men think when they
get sight of the enemy, or they feel it if they do not think it, and it is this feeling that gives a
special lustre and a delicious edge to the awareness of everything that is now happening.”
―
Leo Tolstoy
“The sole meaning of life is to serve humanity.”
―
Leo Tolstoy
“The social conditions of life can only be improved by people exercising self-restraint.”
―
Leo Tolstoy
“He knew she was there by the joy and terror that took possession of his heart [...]
Everything was lit up by her. She was the smile that brightened everything around.”
―
Leo Tolstoy
“That which constitutes the cause of the economic poverty of our age is what the English
call over-production (which means that a mass of things are made which are of no use to
anybody, and with which nothing can be done).”
―
Leo Tolstoy
“He disliked contradiction, and still more, arguments that were continually skipping from one
thing to another, introducing new and disconnected points, so that there was no knowing to
which to reply.
―
Leo Tolstoy
“We are forced to fall back on fatalism as an explanation of irrational events (that is to say,
events the reasonableness of which we do not understand).”
―
Leo Tolstoy
“I'm getting old, that's the thing! What's in me now won't be there anymore.”
―
Leo Tolstoy
“The more mental effort he made the clearer he saw that it was undoubtedly so: that he had
really forgotten and overlooked one little circumstance in life - that Death would come and end
everything, so that it was useless to begin anything, and that there was no help for it, Yes it
was terrible but true”
―
Leo Tolstoy
“I think love, both kinds of love, which you remember Plato defines in his "Symposium" -
both kinds of love serve a touchstone for men. Some men understand only the one, some only
the other. Those who understand only the non-platonic love need not speak of tragedy. For
such love there can be no tragedy. "Thank you kindly for the pleasure, good bye," and that's
the whole tragedy. And for the platonic love there can be no tragedy either, because there
everything is clear and pure.”
―
Leo Tolstoy
“The difference between real material poison and intellectual poison is that most material
poison is disgusting to the taste, but intellectual poison, which takes the form of cheap
newspapers or bad books, can unfortunately sometimes be attractive.”
―
Leo Tolstoy
“Is it really possible to tell someone else what one feels?”
―
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
“Luxury cannot be obtained other than by enslaving other people.”
―
Leo Tolstoy
