“either you are so underdeveloped that you can't see all that you can do, or you won't
sacrifice your ease, your vanity, or whatever it is, to do it...”
―
Leo Tolstoy
“I often think that men don't understand what is noble and what is ignorant, though they always
talk about it.”
―
Leo Tolstoy
“Ivan Ilych's life had been most simple and most ordinary and therefore most terrible.”
―
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
“Is it really possible to tell someone else what one feels?”
―
Leo Tolstoy
“Who am I? I am that which thou hast searched for since thy baby eyes gazed wonderingly
upon the world, whose horizon hides this real life from thee. I am that which in thy heart thou
hast prayed for, demanded as thy birthright, although thou hast not known what it was. I am
that which has lain in thy soul for hundreds and thousands of years. Sometimes I lay in thee
grieving because thou didst not recognize me; sometimes I raised my head, opened my eyes,
and extended my arms calling thee either tenderly and quietly, or strenuously, demanding that
thou shouldst rebel against the iron chains which bound thee to the earth.”
―
Leo Tolstoy
“They've got no idea what happiness is, they don't know that without this love there is no
happiness or unhappiness for us--there is no life.”
―
Leo Tolstoy
“He felt that now over his every word, his every deed, there was a judge, a judgment, which
was dearer to him than the judgments of all the people in the world. He spoke now, and along
with his words he considered the impression his words would make on Natasha. He did not
deliberately say what would be please her, but whatever he said, he judged himself from her
point of view.”
―
Leo Tolstoy
“Olenin always took his own path and had an unconscious objection to the beaten tracks.”
―
Leo Tolstoy
“A free thinker used to be a man who had been educated on ideas of religion, law, morality,
and had arrived at free thought by virtue of his own struggle and toil; but now a new type of
born freethinker has been appearing, who’ve never even heard that there have been laws of
morality and religion, and that there are authorities, but who simply grow up with negative
ideas about everything, that is savages.”
―
Leo Tolstoy
“For if we allow that human life is always guided by reason, we destroy the premise that life
is possible at all.
―
Leo Tolstoy
“she smiled at him, and at her own fears.”
―
Leo Tolstoy
“All the variety, all the charm, all the beauty of life are made up of light and shade.”
―
Leo Tolstoy
“She did not want to talk of her sorrow, but with that sorrow in her heart she could not talk of
outside matters.”
―
Leo Tolstoy
