What did that show? It showed that he had lived well, but thought badly.”
―
Leo Tolstoy
“How good it would be to know where to look for help in this life and what to expect after it,
there, beyond the grave! How happy and calm I'd be, if I could say now: Lord, have mercy on
me! ... But to whom shall I say it? Either it is an indefinable, unfathomable power, which I not
only cannot address, but which I cannot express in words - the great all or nothing...or it is that
God of whom Princess Marya has sewn in here, in this amulet? Nothing, nothing is certain,
except the insignificance of everything I can comprehend and the grandeur of something
incomprehensible but most important!
―
Leo Tolstoy
“You're not going to be different ... you're going to be the same as you've always been; with
doubts, everlasting dissatisfaction with yourself, vain efforts to amend, and falls, and
everlasting expectation, of a happiness which you won't get, and which isn't possible for you.”
―
Leo Tolstoy
“Pierre looked into the sky, into the depths of the retreating, twinkling stars. "And all this is
mine, and all this is in me, and all this is me!" thought Pierre. "And all this they've caught and
put in a shed and boarded it up!”
―
Leo Tolstoy
“Even in the valley of the shadow of death, two and two do not make six.”
―
Leo Tolstoy
“To get rid of an enemy one must love him. ”
―
Leo Tolstoy
“Sight-seeing, aside from the fact that everything had been seen already, could not have for
him--and intelligent Russian--the inexplicable importance attached to it by the English.”
―
Leo Tolstoy
“Ah, if everyone was as sensitive as you! There's no girl who hasn't gone through that. And
it's all so unimportant!”
―
Leo Tolstoy
“But a man’s relationship to the world is determined not just by his intellect but by his
feelings and by his who aggregate of spiritual forces. However much one implies or explains to
a person that all that truly exists is no more than an idea, or that everything is made up of
atoms, or that the essence of life is substance or will, or that heat, light, movement and
electricity are only manifestations of one and the same energy; however much you explain this
to a man—a being who feels, suffers, rejoices, fears and hopes—it will not explain his place in
the universe.”
―
Leo Tolstoy
“And you know, there's less charm in life when you think about death--but it's more peaceful.”
―
Leo Tolstoy
“I felt that what I had been standing on had collapsed and that I had nothing left under my
feet. What I had lived on no longer existed, and there was nothing left.
―
Leo Tolstoy
“Error is the force that welds men together; truth is communicated to men only by deeds of
truth.
―
Leo Tolstoy
“nothing has contributed so much to the obscuring of Christian truth in the eyes of the
heathen, and has hindered so much the diffusion of Christianity through the world, as the
disregard of [non-resistance] by men calling themselves Christians, and the permission of war
and violence to Christians.
―
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
“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
