“Man lives consciously for himself, but serves as an unconscious instrument for the
achievement of historical, universally human goals. ”
―
Leo Tolstoy
“And those who only know the non-platonic love have no need to talk of tragedy. In such
love there can be no sort of tragedy.”
―
Leo Tolstoy
“If I know the way home and am walking along it drunkenly, is it any less the right way
because I am staggering from side to side! ”
―
Leo Tolstoy
“When you understand that you will die to-morrow, if not to-day, and nothing will be left,
then everything is so unimportant!... So one goes on living, amusing oneself with hunting, with
work - anything so as not think of death”
―
Leo Tolstoy
“What are you talking about?' cried Lukashka. 'We must go through the middle gates, of
course.”
―
Leo Tolstoy
“No, it's all the same to me," said Levin, unable to suppress a smile.”
―
Leo Tolstoy
“When it is impossible to stretch the very elastic threads of historical ratiocination any
farther, when actions are clearly contrary to all that humanity calls right or even just, the
historians produce a saving conception of ‘greatness.’ ‘Greatness,’ it seems, excludes the
standards of right and wrong. For the ‘great’ man nothing is wrong, there is no atrocity for
which a ‘great’ man can be blamed.”
―
Leo Tolstoy
“Ivan Ilych's life had been most simple and most ordinary and therefore most terrible.”
―
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
“At one time,' Golenishchev continued, either not observing or not willing to observe that
both Anna and Vronsky wanted to speak, 'at one time a freethinker was a man who had been
brought up in the conception of religion, law, and morality, who reached freethought only after
conflict and difficulty. But now a new type of born freethinkers has appeared, who grow up
without so much as hearing that there used to be laws of morality, or religion, that authorities
existed. They grow up in ideas of negation in everything -- in other words, utter savages.”
―
Leo Tolstoy
“Just when the question of how to live had become clearer to him, a new insoluble problem
presented itself - Death.”
―
Leo Tolstoy
“Human science fragments everything in order to understand it, kills everything in order to
examine it. ”
―
Leo Tolstoy
“- Every girl is proud of an offer, Yes, every girl, but not she”
―
Leo Tolstoy
“There will be today, there will be tomorrow, there will be always, and there was yesterday,
and there was the day before...”
―
Leo Tolstoy
I'm not living, I'm waiting for a solution that goes on and on being put off.”
―
Leo Tolstoy
