“I have discovered nothing. I have only found out what I knew. I understand the force that in
the past gave me life, and now too gives me life. I have been set free from falsity, I have found
the Master.”
―
Leo Tolstoy
“Death, the inevitable end of everything, confronted him for the first time with irresistible
force. And that Death which was present in this dear brother (who, waking up, moaned and by
habit called indiscriminately on God and on the devil) was not so far away as it hitherto
seemed to be. It was within himself to- he felt it. If not today, then tomorrow or thirty years
hence, was it not all the same? But what that inevitable Death was, he not only did not know,
not only had never considered, but could not and dared not consider.”
―
Leo Tolstoy
“Love is life. All, everything that I understand, I understand only because I love. Everything is,
everything exists, only because I love. Everything is united by it alone. Love is God, and to die
means that I, a particle of love, shall return to the general and eternal source.”
―
Leo Tolstoy
“He is not apprehended by reason, but by life.”
―
Leo Tolstoy
“At the advent of danger there are always two voices that speak with equal force in the
human heart: one very reasonably invites a man to consider the nature of the peril and the
means of escaping it; the other, with a still greater show of reason, argues that it is too
depressing and painful to think of the danger since it is not in man's power to foresee
everything and avert the general march of events, and it is better therefore to shut one's eyes
to the disagreeable until it actually comes, and to think instead of what is pleasant. When a
man is alone he generally listens to the first voice; in the company of his fellow-men, to the
second.”
―
Leo Tolstoy
“Formerly...when he tried to do anything for the good of everybody, for humanity...for the
whole village, he had noticed that the thoughts of it were agreeable, but the activity itself was
always unsatisfactory; there was no full assurance that the work was really necessary, and the
activity itself, which at first seemed so great, ever lessened and lessened till it vanished. But
now...when he began to confine himself more and more to living for himself, though he no
longer felt any joy at the thought of his activity, he felt confident that his work was necessary,
saw that it progressed far better than formerly, and that it was always growing more and
more.”
―
Leo Tolstoy
“Moreover, during his wife's confinement, something had happened that seemed
extraordinary to him. He, an unbeliever, had fallen into praying, and at the moment he prayed,
he believed. But that moment had passed, and he could not make his state of mind at that
moment fit into the rest of his life.”
―
Leo Tolstoy
“Blessed are the peacemakers; theirs is the kingdom of heaven”
―
Leo Tolstoy
“He had the unlucky capacity many men have of seeing and believing in the possibility of
goodness and truth, but of seeing the evil and falsehood of life too clearly to take any serious
part in it.”
―
Leo Tolstoy
“intriguing people have to invent a noxious, dangerous party...”
―
Leo Tolstoy
“Was it by reason that I attained to the knowledge that I must love my neighbor and not to
throttle him?. They told me so when I was a child, and I gladly believed it, because they told
me what was already in my soul. But who discovered it? Not reason! Reason has discovered
the struggle for existence and the law that I must throttle all those who hinder the satisfaction
of my desires. That is the deduction reason makes. But the law of loving others couldn't be
discovered by reason, because it is unreasonable.”
―
Leo Tolstoy
“Levin had often noticed in arguments between even the most intelligent people that after
enormous efforts, an enormous number of logical subtleties and words, the arguers would
finally come to the awareness that what they had spent so long struggling to prove to each
other had been known to them long, long before, from the beginning of the argument, but that
they loved different things and therefore did not want to name what they loved, so as not to be
challenged. He had often felt that sometimes during an argument you would understand what
your opponent loves, and suddenly come to love the same thing yourself, and agree all at
once, and then all reasonings would fall away as superfluous; and sometimes it was the other
way round: you would finally say what you yourself love, for the sake of which you are
inventing your reasonings, and if you happened to say it well and sincerely, the opponent
would suddenly agree and stop arguing. That was the very thing he wanted to say.
―
Leo Tolstoy
“If you look for perfection, you will never be satisfied.”
―
Leo Tolstoy
“The wife did not leave her own room, the husband had not been at home for three days.
The children ran wild all over the house; the English governess quarreled with the
housekeeper, and wrote”
―
Leo Tolstoy
“But that had been grief--this was joy. Yet that grief and this joy were alike outside all the
ordinary conditions of life; they were loopholes, as it were, in that ordinary life through which
there came glimpses of something sublime. And in the contemplation of this sublime
something the soul was exalted to inconceivable heights of which it had before had no
conception, while reason lagged behind, unable to keep up with it.”
―
Leo Tolstoy
