“Another's wife is a white swan, and ours is bitter wormwood.”
―
Leo Tolstoy
“I don’t count life as life without love”
―
Leo Tolstoy
“He looked at her as a man might look at a faded flower he had plucked, in which it was
difficult for him to trace the beauty that had made him pick and so destroy it”
―
Leo Tolstoy
“For if we allow that human life is always guided by reason, we destroy the premise that life
is possible at all.
―
Leo Tolstoy
“Many people have ideas on how others should change; few people have ideas on how
they should change. ”
―
Leo Tolstoy
“Real science studies and makes accessible that knowledge which people at that period of
history think important, and real art transfers this truth from the domain of knowledge to the
domain of feelings.”
―
Leo Tolstoy
“If I know the way home and am walking along it drunkenly, is it any less the right way
because I am staggering from side to side! ”
―
Leo Tolstoy
“What energy!' I thought. 'Man has conquered everything, and destroyed millions of plants,
yet this one won't submit.”
―
Leo Tolstoy
“I turned my attention to every thing that was done by people who claimed to be Christians,
I was horrified.”
―
Leo Tolstoy
“A cigar is a sort of thing, not exactly a pleasure, but the crown and outward sign of
pleasure.”
―
Leo Tolstoy
“God forgive me everything!’ she said, feeling the impossibility of struggling...”
―
Leo Tolstoy
“A man is never such an egoist as at moments of spiritual exaltation, when it seems to him
that there is nothing in the world more splendid and fascinating than himself.”
―
Leo Tolstoy
“Art should cause violence to be set aside and it is only art that can accomplish this.”
―
Leo Tolstoy
“He had never thought the question over clearly, but vaguely imagined that his wife had
long suspected him of being unfaithful to her and was looking the other way. It even seemed
to him that she, a worn-out, aged, no longer beautiful woman, not remarkable for anything,
simple, merely a kind mother of a family, ought in all fairness to be indulgent. It turned out to
be quite the opposite.”
―
Leo Tolstoy
“So it would be, were it not for the law of inertia, as immutable a force in men and nations
as in inanimate bodies. In men it takes the form of the psychological principle, so truly
expressed in the words of the Gospel, " They have loved darkness better than light, because
their deeds were evil." This principle shows itself in men not trying to recognise the truth, but to
persuade themselves that the life they are leading, which is what they like and are used to, is
a life perfectly consistent with truth.”
―
Leo Tolstoy
