“If we admit that human life can be ruled by reason, then all possibility of life is destroyed.”
―
Leo Tolstoy
“He is not apprehended by reason, but by life.”
―
Leo Tolstoy
“I sit on a man's back choking him and making him carry me, and yet assure myself and others
that i am sorry for him and wish to lighten his load by all means possible....except by getting
off his back.”
―
Leo Tolstoy
“it is hard for anyone who is dissatisfied not to blame some one else, and especially the
person nearest of all to him, for the ground of his dissatisfaction.”
―
Leo Tolstoy
“Music makes me forget myself, my true condition, it carries me off into another state of
being, one that isn't my own: under the influence of music I have the illusion of feeling things I
don't really feel, of understanding things I don't understand, being able to do things I'm not
able to do (...) Can it really be allowable for anyone who feels like it to hypnotize another
person, or many other persons, and then do what he likes with them? Particularly if the
hypnotist is the first unscrupulous individual who happens to come along?”
―
Leo Tolstoy
“When you love someone, you love the person as they are, and not as you'd like them to be.”
―
Leo Tolstoy
“It seems that only God can know the truth; it is to Him alone we must appeal, and from Him
alone expect mercy.”
―
Leo Tolstoy
“Ambition was the old dream of his youth and childhood, a dream which he did not confess
even to himself, though it was so strong that now his passion was even doing battle with his
love”
―
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
“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
“If a man lives, then he believes in something. If he didn't believe that one must live for
something, then he wouldn't live. If he doesn't see and doesn't understand the illusoriness of
the finite, he believes in the infinite; if he does understand the illusoriness of the finite, he must
believe in the infinite without which one cannot live.”
―
Leo Tolstoy
“It would be a sin to help you destroy yourself.”
―
Leo Tolstoy
“I felt that what I had been standing on had collapsed and that I had nothing left under my
feet. What I had lived on no longer existed, and there was nothing left.
―
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
“Here's my advice to you: don't marry until you can tell yourself that you've done all you could,
and until you've stopped loving the women you've chosen, until you see her clearly, otherwise
you'll be cruelly and irremediably mistaken. Marry when you're old and good for nothing...
Otherwise all that's good and lofty in you will be lost.”
―
Leo Tolstoy
