O ye, who see perplexities over your heads, beneath your feet, and to the right and left of
you; you will be an eternal enigma unto yourselves until ye become humble and joyful as
children. Then will ye find Me, and having found Me in yourselves, you will rule over worlds,
and looking out from the great world within to the little world without, you will bless everything
that is, and find all is well with time and with you. KRISHNA.”
―
Leo Tolstoy
“In his Petersburg world all people were divided into utterly opposed classes. One, the
lower class, vulgar, stupid, and, above all, ridiculous people, who believe that one husband
ought to live with the one wife whom he has lawfully married; that a girl should be innocent, a
woman modest, and a man manly, self-controlled, and strong; that one ought to bring up one's
children, earn one's bread, and pay one's debts; and various similar absurdities. This was the
class of old-fashioned and ridiculous people. But there was another class of people, the real
people. To this class they all belonged, and in it the great thing was to be elegant, generous,
plucky, gay, to abandon oneself without a blush to every passion, and to laugh at everything
else.”
―
Leo Tolstoy
“When one's head is gone one doesn't weep over one's hair!”
―
Leo Tolstoy
“How strange, extraordinary, and joyful it was to her to think that her son - the little son,
whose tiny limbs had faintly stirred within her twenty years ago, for whose sake she had so
often quarreled with the count, who would spoil him, the little son, who had first learnt to say
grusha, and then had learnt to say baba - that that son was now in a foreign land, in strange
surroundings, a manly warrior, alone without help or guidance, doing there his proper manly
work. All the world-wide experience of ages, proving that children do imperceptibly from the
cradle grow up into men, did not exist for the countess. The growth of her son had been for
her at every strage of his growth just as extraordinary as though millions of millions of men
had not grown up in the same way. Just as, twenty years before, she could not believe that the
little creature that was lying somewhere under her heart, would one day cry and learn to talk,
now she could not believe that the same little creature could be that strong, brave man, that
paragon of sons and of men that, judging by this letter, he was now.”
―
Leo Tolstoy
“It is impossible for there to be a person with no religion (i.e. without any kind of relationship
to the world) as it is for there to be a person without a heart. He may not know that he has a
religion, just as a person may not know that he has a heart, but it is no more possible for a
person to exist without a religion than without a heart.”
―
Leo Tolstoy
“We do not love people so much for the good they have done us, as for the good we do
them”
―
Leo Tolstoy
“There is an old Eastern fable about a traveler who is taken unawares on the steppes by a
ferocious wild animal. In order to escape the beast the traveler hides in an empty well, but at
the bottom of the well he sees a dragon with its jaws open, ready to devour him. The poor
fellow does not dare to climb out because he is afraid of being eaten by the rapacious beast,
neither does he dare drop to the bottom of the well for fear of being eaten by the dragon. So
he seizes hold of a branch of a bush that is growing in the crevices of the well and clings on to
it. His arms grow weak and he knows that he will soon have to resign himself to the death that
awaits him on either side. Yet he still clings on, and while he is holding on to the branch he
looks around and sees that two mice, one black and one white, are steadily working their way
round the bush he is hanging from, gnawing away at it. Sooner or later they will eat through it
and the branch will snap, and he will fall into the jaws of the dragon. The traveler sees this and
knows that he will inevitably perish. But while he is still hanging there he sees some drops of
honey on the leaves of the bush, stretches out his tongue and licks them. In the same way I
am clinging to the tree of life, knowing full well that the dragon of death inevitably awaits me,
ready to tear me to pieces, and I cannot understand how I have fallen into this torment. And Itry licking the honey that once consoled me, but it no longer gives me pleasure. The white
mouse and the black mouse – day and night – are gnawing at the branch from which I am
hanging. I can see the dragon clearly and the honey no longer tastes sweet. I can see only
one thing; the inescapable dragon and the mice, and I cannot tear my eyes away from them.
And this is no fable but the truth, the truth that is irrefutable and intelligible to everyone.
―
Leo Tolstoy
“There was no solution, save that universal solution which life gives to all questions, even
the most complex and insolvable: One must live in the needs of the day--that is, forget
oneself.”
―
Leo Tolstoy
“My field was God’s earth. Wherever I ploughed, there was my field. Land was free. It was a
thing no man called his own. Labor was the only thing men called their own.”
―
Leo Tolstoy
“You are all misleading one another, and are yourselves deceived. The sun does not go
round the earth, but the earth goes round the sun, revolving as it goes, and turning towards
the sun in the course of each twenty-four hours, not only Japan, and the Philippines, and
Sumatra where we now are, but Africa, and Europe, and America, and many lands besides.
The sun does not shine for some one mountain, or for some one island, or for some one sea,
nor even for one earth alone, but for other planets as well as our earth. If you would only look
up at the heavens, instead of at the ground beneath your own feet, you might all understand
this, and would then no longer suppose that the sun shines for you, or for your country alone.”
―
Leo Tolstoy
“The Bible legend tells us that the absence of toil - idleness - was a condition of the first
man's state of bliss before the Fall. This love of idleness has remained the same in the fallen
man, but the curse still lies heavy on the human race....because our moral nature is such that
we are unable to be idle and at peace.”
―
Leo Tolstoy
“The antagonism between life and conscience may be removed in two ways: by a change
of life or by a change of conscience.”
―
Leo Tolstoy
“Life is everything. Life is God. Everything shifts and moves, and this movement is God.
And while there is life, there is delight in the self-awareness of the divinity. To love life is to
love God. The hardest and most blissful thing is to love this life in one's suffering, in the
guiltlessness of suffering.
―
Leo Tolstoy
Children's and Household Tales (German: Kinder- und Hausmärchen) is a collection of
German origin fairy tales first published in 1812 by Jacob and Wilhelm Grimm, the Brothers
Grimm. The collection is commonly known today as Grimms' Fairy Tales (German: Grimms
Märchen).”
―
Leo Tolstoy
“Why do i live? In the infinity of space, and infinity of time infinitely small particles mutate
with infinite complexity. When you understand the laws of these mutations, you'll understand
why you live.”
―
Leo Tolstoy