“In order not to give myself up to the desire to kill him on the spot, I felt compelled to treat him cordially.”

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

“Her eyes, always sad, now looked into the mirror with particular hopelessness. "She's flattering me," thought the princess, and she turned away and went on reading. Julie, however, was not flattering her friend: indeed, the princess's eyes, large, deep, and luminous (sometimes it was as if rays of light came from them in sheaves), were so beautiful that very often, despite the unattractiveness of the whole face, those eyes were more attractive than beauty. But the princess had never seen the good expression of thise eyes, the expression they had in moments when she was not thinking of herself. As with all people, the moment she looked in the mirror, her face assumed a strained, unnatural, bad expression.”

Leo Tolstoy

“He knew that Vronsky could not be prevented from amusing himself with painting; he knew that he and all dilettanti had a perfect right to paint what they liked, but it was distasteful to him. A man could not be prevented from making himself a big wax doll, and kissing it. But if the man were to come with the doll and sit before a man in love, and began caressing his doll as the lover caressed the woman he loved, it would be distasteful to the lover. Just such a distasteful sensation was what Mihailov felt at the sight of Vronsky’s painting: he felt it both ludicrous and irritating, both pitiable and offensive.”

Leo Tolstoy

“Stepan Arkadyich smiled. He knew so well this feeling of Levin's, knew that for him all the girls in the world were divided into two sorts: one sort was all the girls in the world except her, and these girls had all human weaknesses and were very ordinary girls; the other sort was her alone, with no weaknesses and higher than everything human.”

Leo Tolstoy

“It was long before I could believe that human learning had no clear answer to this question. For a long time it seemed to me, as I listened to the gravity and seriousness wherewith Science affirmed its positions on matters unconnected with the problem of life, that I must have misunderstood something. For a long time I was timid in the presence in learning, and I fancied that the insufficiency of the answers which I received was not its fault, but was owing to my own gross ignorance, but this thing was not a joke or a pastime with me, but the business of my life, and I was at last forced, willy-nilly, to the conclusion that these questions of mine were the only legitimate questions underlying all knowledge, and that it was not I that was in fault in putting them, but science in pretending to have an answer for them.”

Leo Tolstoy

“My principal sin is doubt. I doubt everything, and am in doubt most of the time.”

Leo Tolstoy

“Boredom: the desire for desires.”

Leo Tolstoy

“without knowing who I am and why I’m here it is impossible to live. Yet I cannot know that and therefore I cannot live”

Leo Tolstoy

“To know God and to live is one and the same thing. God is life.”

Leo Tolstoy

“It was necessary that millions of men in whose hands lay the real power -- the soldiers who fired, or transported provisions and guns -- should consent to carry out the will of these weak individuals...”

Leo Tolstoy

“We know that man has the faculty of becoming completely absorbed in a subject however trivial it may be, and that there is no subject so trivial that it will not grow to infinite proportions if one's entire attention is devoted to it.”

Leo Tolstoy

“Pierre's insanity consisted in the face that he did not wait, as before, for personal reasons, which he called people's merits, in order to love them, but love overflowed his heart, and loving people without reason, he discovered the unquestionable reasons for which it was worth loving them.”

Leo Tolstoy

“The only thing that we know is that we know nothing, and that is the highest flight of human wisdom.”

Leo Tolstoy

“In order to undertake anything in family life, it is necessary that there be either complete discord between the spouses or loving harmony.”

Leo Tolstoy


Contact Us


Send us a mail and we will get in touch with you soon!

You can email us at: contact@fancyread.com
Fancyread Inc.