“We are all brothers, and yet I live by receiving a salary for arraigning, judging and
punishing a thief or a prostitute, whose existence is conditioned by the whole consumption of
my life.
―
Leo Tolstoy
“Nothing but ambition, nothing but the desire to get on, that's all there is in his soul," she
thought; "as for these lofty ideals, love of culture, religion, they are only so many tools for
getting on.”
―
Leo Tolstoy
“All, everything that I understand, I understand only because I love.”
―
Leo Tolstoy
“A wife's a worry, a non-wife's even worse.”
―
Leo Tolstoy
“There is no greatness where simplicity, goodness and truth are absent”
―
Leo Tolstoy
“I am always with myself, and it is I who am my tormentor.”
―
Leo Tolstoy
“Now that Vronsky had deceived her, she was prepared to love Levin and to hate Vronsky.”
―
Leo Tolstoy
“... for nightinggales - we know - can’t live on fairytales.”
―
Leo Tolstoy
“Music makes me forget myself, my true condition, it carries me off into another state of
being, one that isn't my own: under the influence of music I have the illusion of feeling things I
don't really feel, of understanding things I don't understand, being able to do things I'm not
able to do (...) Can it really be allowable for anyone who feels like it to hypnotize another
person, or many other persons, and then do what he likes with them? Particularly if the
hypnotist is the first unscrupulous individual who happens to come along?”
―
Leo Tolstoy
“kitty always assumed the most beautiful things about people”
―
Leo Tolstoy
“Oh no, Papa, Kitty objected warmly. Varenka adores her. And besides, she does so much
good! Ask anyone you like! Everybody knows her and Aline Stah. Perhaps, he said, pressing
her arm with his elbow. But it is better to do good so that, ask whom you will, no one knows
anything about it.”
―
Leo Tolstoy
“Here's my advice to you: don't marry until you can tell yourself that you've done all you could,
and until you've stopped loving the women you've chosen, until you see her clearly, otherwise
you'll be cruelly and irremediably mistaken. Marry when you're old and good for nothing...
Otherwise all that's good and lofty in you will be lost.”
―
Leo Tolstoy
“In order to forgive, one must have lived through what I have lived through, and may God
spare her that.”
―
Leo Tolstoy
“I often think how unfairly life's good fortune is sometimes distributed. ”
―
Leo Tolstoy
“Here I am...wanting to accomplish something and completely forgetting it must all end--that
there is such a thing as death.”
―
Leo Tolstoy
