“Ah, if everyone was as sensitive as you! There's no girl who hasn't gone through that. And
it's all so unimportant!”
―
Leo Tolstoy
“Talent is the capacity to direct concentrated attention upon the subject: "the gift of seeing
what others have not seen.”
―
Leo Tolstoy
“Those whom God wishes to destroy he drives mad.”
―
Leo Tolstoy
“It was necessary that millions of men in whose hands lay the real power -- the soldiers who
fired, or transported provisions and guns -- should consent to carry out the will of these weak
individuals...”
―
Leo Tolstoy
“Well, what is that to me? I can't see her!" she cried.”
―
Leo Tolstoy
“Her motherly instinct told her that there was too much of something in Natasha, and that it
would prevent her from being happy.”
―
Leo Tolstoy
“Her glance, the touch of her hand, set him aflame. He kissed the palm of his hand where
she had touched it, and went home, happy in the sense that he had got nearer to the
attainment of his aims that evening...”
―
Leo Tolstoy
“Man must not check reason by tradition, but contrariwise, must check tradition by reason.”
―
Leo Tolstoy
“But perhaps it is always so, that men form their conceptions from fictitious, conventional
types, and then—all the combinations made—they are tired of the fictitious figures and begin
to invent more natural, true figures.”
―
Leo Tolstoy
“...the role of the disappointed lover of a maiden or of any single woman might be
ridiculous; but the role of a man who was pursuing a married woman, and who made it the
purpose of his life at all cost to draw her into adultery, was one which had in it something
beautiful and dignified and could never be ridiculous....”
―
Leo Tolstoy
“vegetarianism is the taproot of humanitarianism.”
―
Leo Tolstoy
“A man's every action is inevitably conditioned by what surrounds him and by his own
body.”
―
Leo Tolstoy
“Art is not a handicraft; it is the transmission of feeling the artist has experienced.
―
Leo Tolstoy
“As often happens between people who have chosen different ways, each of them, while
rationally justifying the other's activity, despised it in his heart. To each of them it seemed that
the life he led was the only real life, and the one his friend led was a mere illusion.”
―
Leo Tolstoy
