“I always loved you, and if one loves anyone, one loves the whole person, just as they are and
not as one would like them to be. -Dolly
―
Leo Tolstoy
“The goal of the artist is not to solve a question irrefutably, but to force people to love life in
all its countless, inexhaustible manifestations.”
―
Leo Tolstoy
“You've said nothing, of course, and I ask nothing," he was saying; "but you know that
friendship's not what I want: that there's only one happiness in life for me, that word that you
dislike so...yes, love!...”
―
Leo Tolstoy
“That only shows you have no heart,’ she said. But her eyes said that she knew he had a
heart, and that was why she was afraid of him”
―
Leo Tolstoy
“wisdom needs no violence...As it is we have played at war – that’s what’s vile! We play at
magnanimity and all that stuff. Such magnanimity and sensibility are like the magnanimity and
sensibility of a lady who faints when she sees a calf being killed: she is so kindhearted that
she can’t look at blood, but enjoys eating the calf served up with sauce...If there was none of
this magnanimity in war, we should go to war only when it was worth while going to certain
death, as it is now. Then there would not be war because Paul Ivanovich had offended
Michael Ivanovich.”
―
Leo Tolstoy
“When loving with human love one may pass from love to hatred, but divine love cannot
change.”
―
Leo Tolstoy
“Was it through reason that I arrived at the necessity of loving my neighbor and not
throttling him?...Not reason. Reason discovered the struggle for existence and the law which
demands that everyone who hinders the satisfaction of my desires should be throttled. That is
the conclusion of reason. Reason could not discover love for the other, because it’s
unreasonable.”
―
Leo Tolstoy
“There are no conditions to which a man may not become accustomed, particularly if he
sees that they are accepted by those about him.”
―
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
“Stepan Arkadyevitch had not chosen his political opinions or his views; these political
opinions and views had come to him of themselves, just as he did not choose the shapes of
his hat and coat, but simply took those that were being worn. ”
―
Leo Tolstoy
“He had never thought the question over clearly, but vaguely imagined that his wife had
long suspected him of being unfaithful to her and was looking the other way. It even seemed
to him that she, a worn-out, aged, no longer beautiful woman, not remarkable for anything,
simple, merely a kind mother of a family, ought in all fairness to be indulgent. It turned out to
be quite the opposite.”
―
Leo Tolstoy
“The pleasure lies not in discovering truth, but in searching for it.”
―
Leo Tolstoy
“He sought his former accustomed fear of death and did not find it. "Where is it? What
death?" There was no fear because there was no death.
In place of death there was light.”
―
Leo Tolstoy
“In spite of Stepan Arkadyevitch's efforts to be an attentive father and husband, he never
could keep in his mind that he had a wife and children.”
―
Leo Tolstoy
“They've got no idea what happiness is, they don't know that without this love there is no
happiness or unhappiness for us--there is no life.”
―
Leo Tolstoy
