“It's like scarlet fever: one has to get it over."
"Then one should invent a way of inoculating love, like vaccination.”
―
Leo Tolstoy
“In everything, almost in everything, I wrote I was guided by the need of collecting ideas
which, linked together, would be the expression of myself, though each individual idea,
expressed separately in words, loses its meaning, is horribly debased when only one of the
links, of which it forms a part, is taken by itself. But the interlinking of these ideas is not, I think,
an intellectual process, but something else, and it is impossible to express the source of this
interlinking directly in words; it can only be done indirectly by describing images, actions, and
situations in words.”
―
Leo Tolstoy
“She did worse than break the law, she broke the rules”
―
Leo Tolstoy
“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
“Another's wife is a white swan, and ours is bitter wormwood.”
―
Leo Tolstoy
“All the variety, all the charm, all the beauty of life are made up of light and shade.”
―
Leo Tolstoy
“intriguing people have to invent a noxious, dangerous party...”
―
Leo Tolstoy
“What energy!' I thought. 'Man has conquered everything, and destroyed millions of plants,
yet this one won't submit.”
―
Leo Tolstoy
“All the diversity, all the charm, and all the beauty of life are made up of light and shade.”
―
Leo Tolstoy
“Yes: if only a hundredth of the efforts spent in curing diseases were spent in curing
debauchery, disease would long ago have ceased to exist, whereas now all efforts are
employed, not in extirpating debauchery, but in favoring it, by assuring the harmlessness of
the consequences.”
―
Leo Tolstoy
“It's too easy to criticize a man when he's out of favour, and to make him shoulder the
blame for everybody else's mistakes.”
―
Leo Tolstoy
“The only happy marriages I know are arranged ones.”
―
Leo Tolstoy
“He soon felt that the realization of his desire had given him only a grain of the mountain of
happiness he had expected. It showed him the eternal error people make in imagining that
happiness is the realization of desires.”
―
Leo Tolstoy
