“He knew she was there by the rapture and the terror that seized on his heart. She was
standing talking to a lady at the opposite end of the ground. There was apparently nothing
striking either in her dress or her attitude. But for Levin she was as easy to find in that crowdas a rose among nettles. Everything was made bright by her. She was the smile that shed light
all around her.”
―
Leo Tolstoy
“Answer me two more questions,’ said the King. ‘The first is, Why did the earth bear such
grain then and has ceased to do so now? And the second is, Why your grandson walks with
two crutches, your son with one, and you yourself with none? Your eyes are bright, your teeth
sound, and your speech clear and pleasant to the ear. How have these things come about?’
And the old man answered:
‘These things are so, because men have ceased to live by their own labour, and have taken to
depending on the labour of others. In the old time, men lived according to God’s law. They had
what was their own, and coveted not what others had produced.”
―
Leo Tolstoy
“He never chooses an opinion, he just wears whatever happens to be in style.”
―
Leo Tolstoy
“We do not love people so much for the good they have done us, as for the good we do
them”
―
Leo Tolstoy
“vegetarianism is the taproot of humanitarianism.”
―
Leo Tolstoy
“Each man lives for himself, uses his freedom to achieve his personal goals, and feels with
his whole being that right now he can or cannot do such-and-such an action; but as soon as
he does it, this action, committed at a certain moment in time, becomes irreversible, and
makes itself the property of history, in which is has not a free but a predestined significance. ”
―
Leo Tolstoy
“All, everything that I understand, I understand only because I love.”
―
Leo Tolstoy
“At school he had done things which had formerly seemed to him very horrid and made him
feel disgusted with himself when he did them; but when later on he saw that such actions were
done by people of good position and that they did not regard them as wrong, he was able not
exactly to regard them as right, but to forget about them entirely or not be at all troubled at
remembering them.”
―
Leo Tolstoy
“You're not racing?" joked the officer.
"Mine is a harder race," Alexei Alexandrovich replied respectfully.
And though the reply did not mean anything, the officer pretended that he had heard a clever
phrase from a clever man and had perfectly understood.”
―
Leo Tolstoy
Now, however, he had learned to see the great, the eternal, the infinite in everything, and
therefore, in order to look at it, to enjoy his contemplation of it, he naturally discarded teh
telescope through which he had till then been gazing over the heads of men, and joyfully
surveyed the ever-changeing, eternally great, unfathomable, and infinite life around him. And
the closer he looked, the happier and more seren he was. The awful question: What for? a
simple answer was now always ready in his soul: Because there is a God, that God without
whose will not one hair of a man's head falls.”
―
Leo Tolstoy
“Life did not stop, and one had to live.”
―
Leo Tolstoy
“Woman is deprived of rights from lack of education, and the lack of education results from
the absence of rights. We must not forget that the subjection of women is so complete, and
dates from such ages back that we are often unwilling to recognise the gulf that separates
them from us.”
―
Leo Tolstoy
“A writer is dear and necessary for us only in the measure of which he reveals to us the
inner workings of his very soul.”
―
Leo Tolstoy
“As is always the case with a thoroughly attractive woman, her defect—the shortness of her
upper lip and her half-open mouth—seemed to be her own special and peculiar form of
beauty.”
―
Leo Tolstoy
