“I have learned what must be, and therefore have come to see the whole horror of what is.”
―
Leo Tolstoy
“Chance created the situation; genius made use of it.”
―
Leo Tolstoy
“The strongest of all warriors are these two — Time and Patience.”
―
Leo Tolstoy
“How strange, extraordinary, and joyful it was to her to think that her son - the little son,
whose tiny limbs had faintly stirred within her twenty years ago, for whose sake she had so
often quarreled with the count, who would spoil him, the little son, who had first learnt to say
grusha, and then had learnt to say baba - that that son was now in a foreign land, in strange
surroundings, a manly warrior, alone without help or guidance, doing there his proper manly
work. All the world-wide experience of ages, proving that children do imperceptibly from the
cradle grow up into men, did not exist for the countess. The growth of her son had been for
her at every strage of his growth just as extraordinary as though millions of millions of men
had not grown up in the same way. Just as, twenty years before, she could not believe that the
little creature that was lying somewhere under her heart, would one day cry and learn to talk,
now she could not believe that the same little creature could be that strong, brave man, that
paragon of sons and of men that, judging by this letter, he was now.”
―
Leo Tolstoy
“We imagine that when we are thrown out of our usual ruts all is lost, but it is only then that
what is new and good begins. While there is life there is happiness. There is much, much
before us.”
―
Leo Tolstoy
“If you could forget and forgive what happened. He snatched the chalk with nervous, trembling fingers, and breaking it, wrote the initial letters
of the following phrase, "I have nothing to forget and to forgive; I have never ceased to love
you.”"
―
Leo Tolstoy
“Then he thought himself unhappy, but happiness was all in the future; now he felt that the
best happiness was already in the past.”
―
Leo Tolstoy
“Sitting in his old schoolroom on the sofa with little cushions on the arms and looking into
Natasha's wildly eager eyes, Rostov was carried back into that world of home and childhood
which had no meaning for anyone else, but gave him some of the greatest pleasure in his life.”
―
Leo Tolstoy
“And I, too, am the same... only there is no love in my heart, or desire for love, no interest
in work, not contentment in myself. And how remote and impossible my old religious
enthusiasms seem now... and my former abounding life! What once seemed so plain and right
– that happiness lay in living for others – is unintelligible now. Why live for others, when life
has not attractions even for oneself?”
―
Leo Tolstoy
“In order to understand, observe, deduce, man must first be conscious of himself as alive
―
Leo Tolstoy
“I wanted to run after him, but remembered that it is ridiculous to run after one's wife's lover
in one's socks; and I did not wish to be ridiculous but terrible.”
―
Leo Tolstoy
“Blessed are the peacemakers; theirs is the kingdom of heaven”
―
Leo Tolstoy
“And the candle by the light of which she had been reading that book filled with anxieties,
deceptions, grief and evil, flared up brighter than ever, lit up for her all that had once been
darkness, sputtered, grew dim and went out for ever.”
―
Leo Tolstoy
