“You say: I am not free. But I have raised and lowered my arm. Everyone understands that
this illogical answer is an irrefutable proof of freedom.”
―
Leo Tolstoy
“Pretence about anything sometimes deceives the wisest and shrewdest man, but, however
cunningly it is hidden, a child of the meanest capacity feels it and is repelled by it.”
―
Leo Tolstoy
“everything comes in time to him who knows how to wait . . . there is nothing stronger than
these two: patience and time, they will do it all.”
―
Leo Tolstoy
“One of the commonest and most generally accepted delusions is that every man can be
qualified in some particular way -- said to be kind, wicked, stupid, energetic, apathetic, and so
on. People are not like that. We may say of a man that he is more often kind than cruel, more
often wise than stupid, more often energetic than apathetic or vice versa; but it could never be
true to say of one man that he is kind or wise, and of another that he is wicked or stupid. Yet
we are always classifying mankind in this way. And it is wrong. Human beings are like rivers;
the water is one and the same in all of them but every river is narrow in some places, flows
swifter in others; here it is broad, there still, or clear, or cold, or muddy or warm. It is the same
with men. Every man bears within him the germs of every human quality, and now manifests
one, now another, and frequently is quite unlike himself, while still remaining the same man.”
―
Leo Tolstoy
“Anna smiled,as people smile at the weaknesses of those they love. . .”
―
Leo Tolstoy
“I often think how unfairly life's good fortune is sometimes distributed. ”
―
Leo Tolstoy
“He is not apprehended by reason, but by life.”
―
Leo Tolstoy
“What is reason given me for, if I am not to use it to avoid bringing unhappy beings into the
world!”
―
Leo Tolstoy
“These principles laid down as in variable rules: that one must pay a card sharper, but
need not pay a tailor; that one must never tell a lie to a man, but one may to a woman; that
one must never cheat any one, but one may a husband; that one must never pardon an insult,
but one may give one and so on. These principles were possibly not reasonable and not good,
but they were of unfailing certainty, and so long as he adhered to them, Vronsky felt that his
heart was at peace and he could hold his head up.”
―
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
“Universal military service may be compared to the efforts of a man to prop up his falling
house who so surrounds it and fills it with props and buttresses and planks and scaffolding
that he manages to keep the house standing only by making it impossible to live in it.”
―
Leo Tolstoy
“I have lived through much and now I think I have found what is needed for happiness. A
quiet, secluded life in the country with possibility of being useful to people.”
―
Leo Tolstoy
“the very fact of the death of someone close to them aroused in all who heard about it, as
always, a feeling of delight that he had died and they hadn't.”
―
Leo Tolstoy
“How strange it was to think that he, who such a short time ago dared not believe in the
happiness of her loving him, now felt unhappy because she loved him too much!”
―
Leo Tolstoy
