“Then as now much time was spent arguing about the rights of women, husband-and-wife
relationships and freedom and rights within marriage, but Natasha had no interest in any such
questions.
Questions like these, then as now, existed exclusively for people who see marriage only in
terms of satisfaction given and received by the married couple, though this is only one
principle of married life rather than its overall meaning, which lies in the family.”
―
Leo Tolstoy
“In order to understand, observe, deduce, man must first be conscious of himself as alive
―
Leo Tolstoy
“Art should cause violence to be set aside and it is only art that can accomplish this.”
―
Leo Tolstoy
“It was all so strange, so unlike what he had been looking forward to.”
―
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
“How can one be well...when one suffers morally?”
―
Leo Tolstoy
“He looked at her as a man might look at a faded flower he had plucked, in which it was
difficult for him to trace the beauty that had made him pick and so destroy it”
―
Leo Tolstoy
“Love them that hate you, but you can't love those you hate.”
―
Leo Tolstoy
“My principal sin is doubt. I doubt everything, and am in doubt most of the time.”
―
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
“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
“A man is never such an egotist as at moments of spiritual ecstasy. At such times it seems
to him that there is nothing on earth more splendid and interesting than himself.”
―
Leo Tolstoy
“Just as a painter needs light in order to put the finishing touches to his picture, so I need
an inner light, which I feel I never have enough of in the autumn.”
―
Leo Tolstoy
“We walked to meet each other up at the time of our love and then we have been irresistibly
drifting in different directions, and there's no altering that.”
―
Leo Tolstoy
“Happiness consists in always aspiring perfection, the pause in any level in perfection is the
pause of happiness”
―
Leo Tolstoy
