“She put both her hands on his shoulders and gazed at him long, with a deep look of ecstasy and yet searchingly. She scrutinized his face to make up for the time she had not seen him. She compared, as she did at every interview with him, the image her fancy painted of him (incomparably finer than, and impossible in actual existence) with his real self”

― Leo Tolstoy

“Another's wife is a white swan, and ours is bitter wormwood.”

― 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 combination of causes of phenomena is beyond the grasp of the human intellect. But the impulse to seek causes is innate in the soul of man. And the human intellect, with no inkling of the immense variety and complexity of circumstances conditioning a phenomenon, any one of which may be separately conceived of as the cause of it, snatches at the first and most easily understood approximation, and says here is the cause.”

― Leo Tolstoy

“There is nothing certain, nothing at all except the unimportance of everything I understand, and the greatness of something incomprehensible but all-important.”

― Leo Tolstoy

“In order to understand, observe, deduce, man must first be conscious of himself as alive

― Leo Tolstoy

“If you look for perfection, you'll never be content.”

― Leo Tolstoy

“Ivan Ilych had been a colleague of the gentlemen present and was liked by them all. He had been ill for some weeks with an illness said to be incurable. His post had been kept open for him, but there had been conjectures that in case of his death Alexeev might receive his appointment, and that either Vinnikov or Shtabel would succeed Alexeev. So on receiving the news of Ivan Ilych's death the first thought of each of the gentlemen in that private room was of the changes and promotions it might occasion among themselves or their acquaintances.”

― Leo Tolstoy

“-Why are you so sad? Because you speak to me in words and I look at you with feelings.”

― Leo Tolstoy

“Let fear once get possession of the soul, and it does not readily yield its place to another sentiment.”

― Leo Tolstoy

What did that show? It showed that he had lived well, but thought badly.”

― Leo Tolstoy

“Everything was made bright by her. She was the smile that shed light all around her.”

― Leo Tolstoy

“When it is impossible to stretch the very elastic threads of historical ratiocination any farther, when actions are clearly contrary to all that humanity calls right or even just, the historians produce a saving conception of ‘greatness.’ ‘Greatness,’ it seems, excludes the standards of right and wrong. For the ‘great’ man nothing is wrong, there is no atrocity for which a ‘great’ man can be blamed.”

― Leo Tolstoy

“The very nastiest and coarsest, I can't tell you. It is not grief, not dullness, but much worse. It is as if all that was good in me had hidden itself, and only what is horrid remains.

― Leo Tolstoy

“Don’t you know that you are all my life to me? ...But peace I do not know, and can’t give to you. My whole being, my love...yes! I cannot think about you and about myself separately. You and I are one to me. And I do not see before us the possibility of peace either for me or for you. I see the possibility of despair, misfortune...or of happiness-what happiness!...Is it impossible?"

― Leo Tolstoy


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