“that in every individual a spiritual element is manifested that gives life to all that exists, and
that this spiritual element strives to unite with everything of a like nature to itself, and attains
this aim through love.”
―
Leo Tolstoy
“When I came to you out of all that dust and heat and toil, I positively smelt violets at once.
But not the sweet violet - you know, that early dark violet that smells of melting snow and
spring grass.”
―
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
“Come, what did I say, repeat it? he would ask. But I could never repeat anything, so
ludicrous it seemed that he should talk to me, not of himself or me, but of something else, as
though it mattered what happened outside us. Only much later I began to have some slight
understanding of his cares and to be interested in them.”
―
Leo Tolstoy
“He was fond of angling, and seemed proud of being able to like such a stupid occupation.”
―
Leo Tolstoy
“I often think how unfairly life's good fortune is sometimes distributed. ”
―
Leo Tolstoy
“My life came to a standstill. I could breathe, eat, drink and sleep, and I could not help doing
these things; but there was no life, for there were no wishes the fulfilment of which I could
consider reasonable. If I desired anything, I knew in advance that whether I satisfied my desire
or not, nothing would come of it. Had a fairy come and offered to fulfil my desires I should not
have known what to ask. If in moments of intoxication I felt something which, though not a
wish, was a habit left by former wishes, in sober moments I knew this to be a delusion and that
there was really nothing to wish for. I could not even wish to know the truth, for I guess of what
it consisted. The truth was that life is meaningless.”
―
Leo Tolstoy
“We can know only that we know nothing. And that is the highest degree of human wisdom.”
―
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
“The question of how things will settle down is the only important question...”
―
Leo Tolstoy
“Yes, it is very likely that I shall be killed tomorrow,’ he thought. And suddenly at this
thought of death a whole series of most distant, most intimate, memories rose in his
imagination: he remembered his last parting from his father and his wife; he remembered the
days when he first loved her. He thought of her pregnancy and felt sorry for her and for
himself, and in a nervously emotional and softened mood he went out of the hut in which he
was billeted with Nesvitsky and began to walk up and down before it.”
―
Leo Tolstoy
“In order to carry through any undertaking in family life, there must necessarily be either
complete division between the husband and wife, or loving agreement. When the relations of a
couple are vacillating and neither one thing nor the other, no sort of enterprise can be
undertake.
―
Leo Tolstoy
“What's all this love of arguing? No one ever convinces anyone else.”
―
Leo Tolstoy
In those days also people loved, envied, sought truth and virtue, and where carried away by
passions; and there was the same complex mental and moral life among the upper classes,
where were in some instances even more refined than now. If we have come to believe in the
perversity and coarse violence of that period, that is only because the traditions, memoirs,
stories, and novels that have been handed to us, record for the most part exceptional cases of
violence and brutality. To suppose that the predominant characteristic of that period was
turbulence, is as unjust as it would before a man, seeing nothing but the tops of trees beyond
a hill, to conclude that there was nothing to be found in that locality but trees.”
―
Leo Tolstoy
