“How can he talk like that?" thought Pierre. He considered his friend a model of perfection
because Prince Andrew possessed in the highest degree just the very qualities Pierre lacked,
and which might be best described as strength of will.”
―
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
“Talent is the capacity to direct concentrated attention upon the subject: "the gift of seeing
what others have not seen.”
―
Leo Tolstoy
“Every man had his personal habits, passions, and impulses toward goodness, beauty, and
truth.”
―
Leo Tolstoy
“Death, the inevitable end of everything, confronted him for the first time with irresistible
force. And that Death which was present in this dear brother (who, waking up, moaned and by
habit called indiscriminately on God and on the devil) was not so far away as it hitherto
seemed to be. It was within himself to- he felt it. If not today, then tomorrow or thirty years
hence, was it not all the same? But what that inevitable Death was, he not only did not know,
not only had never considered, but could not and dared not consider.”
―
Leo Tolstoy
“Let fear once get possession of the soul, and it does not readily yield its place to another
sentiment.”
―
Leo Tolstoy
“So he lived, not knowing and not seeing any chance of knowing what he was and for what
purpose he had been placed in the word.”
―
Leo Tolstoy
“Life meanwhile, the actual life of men with their real interests of health and sickness, labour
and rest, with their interests of thought, science, poetry, music, love, affection, hatred, passion,
went its way, as always, independently, apart from the political amity or enmity of Napoleon
Bonaparte, and apart from all possible reforms.”
―
Leo Tolstoy
“There are people who, on meeting a successful rival, no matter in what, are at once
disposed to turn their backs on everything good in him, and to see only what is bad. There are
people, on the other hand, who desire above all to find in that lucky rival the qualities by which
he has outstripped them, and seek with a throbbing ache at heart only what is good.”
―
Leo Tolstoy
“Yet time and again, from different approaches, I kept coming to the same conclusion, that I
could not have come into the world without any cause, reason, or meaning; that I could not be
the fledgeling fallen from the nest that I felt myself to be. If I lie on my back crying in the tall
grass, like a fledgeling, it is because I know that my mother brought me into the world, kept me
warm, fed me and loved me. But where is she, that mother? If I am abandoned, then who has
abandoned me? I cannot hide myself from the fact that someone who loved me gave birth to
me. Who is this someone? Again, God.”
―
Leo Tolstoy
“There are two sides to the life of every man, his individual life which is the more free the
more abstract it's interests, and his elemental swarm-life in which he inevitably obeys laws laid
down for him”
―
Leo Tolstoy
“Seize the moments of happiness, love and be loved! That is the only reality in the world, all
else is folly. It is the one thing we are interested in here.”
―
Leo Tolstoy
“A battle is won by him who is firmly resolved to win it.”
―
Leo Tolstoy
“Man cannot possess anything as long as he fears death. But to him who does not fear it,
everything belongs. If there was no suffering, man would not know his limits, would not know
himself.
―
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
