“There is no significant idea which cannot be explained to an intelligent twelve year old boy
in fifteen minutes.”
―
Leo Tolstoy
“... for nightinggales - we know - can’t live on fairytales.”
―
Leo Tolstoy
“I assure you that I sleep anywhere, and always like a dormouse.”
―
Leo Tolstoy
“For if we allow that human life is always guided by reason, we destroy the premise that life
is possible at all.
―
Leo Tolstoy
“The strongest of all warriors are these two — Time and Patience.”
―
Leo Tolstoy
“I ask one thing only: I ask for the right to hope, to suffer as I do. But if even that cannot be,
command me to disappear, and I disappear. You shall not see me if my presence is distasteful
to you.”
―
Leo Tolstoy
“You can love a person dear to you with a human love, but an enemy can only be loved with
divine love.”
―
Leo Tolstoy
“And the moujiks? How do the moujiks die?”
―
Leo Tolstoy
“Seize the moments of happiness, love and be loved! That is the only reality in the world, all
else is folly. It is the one thing we are interested in here.”
―
Leo Tolstoy
“The assertion that you are in falsehood and I am in truth ist the most cruel thing one man
can say to another”
―
Leo Tolstoy
“I saw that all who do not profess an identical faith with themselves are considered by the
Orthodox to be heretics, just as the Catholics and others consider the Orthodox to be heretics.
And i saw that the Orthodox (though they try to hide this) regard with hostility all who do not
express their faith by the same external symbols and words as themselves; and this is
naturally so; first, because the assertion that you are in falsehood and I am in truth, is the most
cruel thing one man can say to another; and secondly, because a man loving his children and
brothers cannot help being hostile to those who wish to pervert his children and brothers to a
false belief. And that hostility is increased in proportion to one's greater knowledge of theology.
And to me who considered that truth lay in union by love, it became self-evident that theology
was itself destroying what it ought to produce.”
―
Leo Tolstoy
“He remembered his mother's love for him, and his family's, and his friends', and the
enemy's intention to kill him seemed impossible.”
―
Leo Tolstoy
“As often happens between men who have chosen different pursuits, each, while in
argument justifying the other's activity, despised it in the depth of his heart.”
―
Leo Tolstoy
“Is it possible to love a woman who will never understand the profoundest interests of my
life?
Is it possible to love a woman simply for her beauty,
to love the statue of a woman?”
―
Leo Tolstoy
“If so many men, so many minds, certainly so many hearts, so many kinds of love.”
―
Leo Tolstoy