“Morning or night, Friday or Sunday, made no difference, everything was the same: the
gnawing, excruciating, incessant pain; that awareness of life irrevocably passing but not yet
gone; that dreadful, loathsome death, the only reality, relentlessly closing in on him; and that
same endless lie. What did days, weeks, or hours matter?”
―
Leo Tolstoy
“Where did I get it from? Was it by reason that I attained to the knowledge that I must love
my neighbour and not throttle him? They told me so when I was a child, and I gladly believed
it, because they told me what was already in my soul. But who discovered it? Not reason!
Reason has discovered the struggle for existence and the law that I must throttle all those who
hinder the satisfaction of my desires. That is the deduction reason makes. But the law of
loving others could not be discovered by reason, because it is unreasonable.”
―
Leo Tolstoy
“At the time we were all convinced that we had to speak, write,and publish as quickly as
possible and as much as possible and that this was necessary for the good of mankind.
Thousands of us published and wrote in an effort to teach others, all the while disclaiming and
abusing one another. Without taking note of the fact that we knew nothing, that we did not
know the answer to the simplest question of life, the question of what is right and what is
wrong, we all went on talking without listening to one another.”
―
Leo Tolstoy
“And he has to live like this on the edge of destruction, alone, with nobody at all to
understand or pity him”
―
Leo Tolstoy
“In the name of God, stop a moment, cease your work, look around you.”
―
Leo Tolstoy
“in infinite space and time everything develops, becomes more perfect and more complex,
is differentiated",is to say nothing at all. Those are all words with no meaning, for in the infinite
is neither complex nor simple, no forward nor backward, or better or worse.”
―
Leo Tolstoy
“But to us of a later generation...it is inconceivable that millions of Christian men should
have killed and tortured each other, because Napoleon was ambitious, Alexander firm, English
policy crafty, and the Duke of Oldenburg hardly treated. We cannot grasp the connections
between these circumstances and the bare fact of murder and violence, nor why the duke's
wrongs should induce thousands of men from the other side of Europe to pillage and murder
the inhabitants of the Smolensk and Moscow provinces and to be slaughtered by them.”
―
Leo Tolstoy
“Our body is a machine for living. It is organized for that, it is its nature. Let life go on in it
unhindered and let it defend itself.”
―
Leo Tolstoy
“You're not going to be different ... you're going to be the same as you've always been; with
doubts, everlasting dissatisfaction with yourself, vain efforts to amend, and falls, and
everlasting expectation, of a happiness which you won't get, and which isn't possible for you.”
―
Leo Tolstoy
“They say: sufferings are misfortunes," said Pierre. 'But if at once this minute, I was asked,
would I remain what I was before I was taken prisoner, or go through it all again, I should say,
for God's sake let me rather be a prisoner and eat horseflesh again. We imagine that as soon
as we are torn out of our habitual path all is over, but it is only the beginning of something new
and good. As long as there is life, there is happiness. There is a great deal, a great deal
before us.”
―
Leo Tolstoy
“Respect was invented to cover the empty place where love should be.”
―
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
“the superfluity of the comforts of like destroys all joy in satisfying one's needs, while great
freedom in the choice of occupation...is just what makes the choice of occupation insoluble
difficult and destroys the need and even the possibility of having an occupation.”
―
Leo Tolstoy
“Pierre's insanity consisted in the face that he did not wait, as before, for personal reasons,
which he called people's merits, in order to love them, but love overflowed his heart, and
loving people without reason, he discovered the unquestionable reasons for which it was
worth loving them.”
―
Leo Tolstoy
“There are people who, on meeting a successful rival, no matter in what, are at once
disposed to turn their backs on everything good in him, and to see only what is bad. There are
people, on the other hand, who desire above all to find in that lucky rival the qualities by which
he has outstripped them, and seek with a throbbing ache at heart only what is good.”
―
Leo Tolstoy
