“How can he talk like that?" thought Pierre. He considered his friend a model of perfection
because Prince Andrew possessed in the highest degree just the very qualities Pierre lacked,
and which might be best described as strength of will.”
―
Leo Tolstoy
“Respect was invented to cover the empty place where love should be.”
―
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
“Yes, it is very likely that I shall be killed tomorrow,’ he thought. And suddenly at this
thought of death a whole series of most distant, most intimate, memories rose in his
imagination: he remembered his last parting from his father and his wife; he remembered the
days when he first loved her. He thought of her pregnancy and felt sorry for her and for
himself, and in a nervously emotional and softened mood he went out of the hut in which he
was billeted with Nesvitsky and began to walk up and down before it.”
―
Leo Tolstoy
“He looked at her as a man looks at a faded flower he has gathered, with difficulty
recognizing in it the beauty for which he picked and ruined it. And in spite of this he felt that
then, when his love was stronger, he could, if he had greatly wished it, have torn that love out
of his heart; but now when as at that moment it seemed to him he felt no love for her, he knew
that what bound him to her could not be broken.”
―
Leo Tolstoy
“I ask one thing only: I ask for the right to hope, to suffer as I do. But if even that cannot be,
command me to disappear, and I disappear. You shall not see me if my presence is distasteful
to you.”
―
Leo Tolstoy
“No hay felicidad en la existencia, no hay más que relámpagos de felicidad.”
―
Leo Tolstoy
“But I'm glad you'll see me as I am. Above all, I wouldn't want people to think that I want to
prove anything. I don't want to prove anything, I just want to live; to cause no evil to anyone
but myself. I have that right, haven't I?”
―
Leo Tolstoy
“I'm getting old, that's the thing! What's in me now won't be there anymore.”
―
Leo Tolstoy
“The latter part of her stay in Voronezh had been the happiest period in Princess Marya's
life. Her love for Rostov was not then a source of torment or agitation to her. That love had by
then filled her whole soul and become an inseparable part of herself, and she no longer
struggled against it. Of late Princess Marya was convinced- though she never clearly in so
many words admitted it to herself- that she loved and was beloved.”
―
Leo Tolstoy
“And so there was no single cause for war, but it happened simply because it had to
happen”
―
Leo Tolstoy
“Anna spoke not only naturally and intelligently, but intelligently and casually, without
attaching any value to her own thoughts, yet giving great value to the thoughts of the one she
was talking to.”
―
Leo Tolstoy
“Happiness does not depend on outward things, but on the way we see them.”
―
Leo Tolstoy
“Count Lev Nikolayevich Tolstoy, commonly referred to in English as Leo Tolstoy, was a
Russian novelist, writer, essayist, philosopher, Christian anarchist, pacifist, educational
reformer, moral thinker, and an influential member of the Tolstoy family. As a fiction writer
Tolstoy is widely regarded as one of the greatest of all novelists, particularly noted for his
masterpieces War and Peace and Anna Karenina; in their scope, breadth and realistic
depiction of Russian life, the two books stand at the peak of realistic fiction. As a moral
philosopher he was notable for his ideas on nonviolent resistance through his work The
Kingdom of God is Within You, which in turn influenced such twentieth-century figures as
Mohandas K. Gandhi and Martin Luther King, Jr. Source: Wikipedia”
―
Leo Tolstoy
“But she did not take her eyes from the wheels of the second car. And exactly at the
moment when the midpoint between the wheels drew level with her, she threw away the red
bag, and drawing her head back into her shoulders, fell on her hands under the car, and with a
light movement, as though she would rise immediately, dropped on her knees. And at the
instant she was terror-stricken at what she was doing. 'Where am I? What am I doing? What
for?' She tried to get up, to throw herself back; but something huge and merciless struck her
on the head and dragged her down on her back
―
Leo Tolstoy
