“Man lives consciously for himself, but is an unconscious instrument in the attainment of the
historic, universal aims of humanity.
―
Leo Tolstoy
“Rest, nature, books, music...such is my idea of happiness.”
―
Leo Tolstoy
“I'm getting old, that's the thing! What's in me now won't be there anymore.”
―
Leo Tolstoy
“Rummaging in our souls, we often dig up something that ought to have lain there unnoticed. ”
―
Leo Tolstoy
“But any acquisition that doesn't correspond to the labour expended is dishonest”
―
Leo Tolstoy
“Well, pray if you like, only you'd do better to use your judgment.”
―
Leo Tolstoy
“The assertion that you are in falsehood and I am in truth ist the most cruel thing one man
can say to another”
―
Leo Tolstoy
In those days also people loved, envied, sought truth and virtue, and where carried away by
passions; and there was the same complex mental and moral life among the upper classes,
where were in some instances even more refined than now. If we have come to believe in the
perversity and coarse violence of that period, that is only because the traditions, memoirs,
stories, and novels that have been handed to us, record for the most part exceptional cases of
violence and brutality. To suppose that the predominant characteristic of that period was
turbulence, is as unjust as it would before a man, seeing nothing but the tops of trees beyond
a hill, to conclude that there was nothing to be found in that locality but trees.”
―
Leo Tolstoy
“We are all brothers, and yet I live by receiving a salary for arraigning, judging and
punishing a thief or a prostitute, whose existence is conditioned by the whole consumption of
my life.
―
Leo Tolstoy
“But despite the fact that the doctors treated him, bled him, and gave him medicines to drink
-- he recovered.”
―
Leo Tolstoy
“I wanted movement and not a calm course of existence. I wanted excitement and danger and
the chance to sacrifice myself for my love.”
―
Leo Tolstoy
“• A man in motion always devises an aim for that motion. To be able to go a thousand
miles he must imagine that something good awaits him at the end of those thousand miles.
One must have the prospect of a promised land to have the strength to move.”
―
Leo Tolstoy
“He wanted and needed their love, but felt none towards them. He now had neither love nor
humility nor purity”
―
Leo Tolstoy
“I don't want to prove anything; I merely want to live, to do no one harm but myself. I have
the right to do that, haven't I?”
―
Leo Tolstoy
“The very nastiest and coarsest, I can't tell you. It is not grief, not dullness, but much worse.
It is as if all that was good in me had hidden itself, and only what is horrid remains.
―
Leo Tolstoy
