“And so there was no single cause for war, but it happened simply because it had to
happen”
―
Leo Tolstoy
“I have learned what must be, and therefore have come to see the whole horror of what is.”
―
Leo Tolstoy
“I often think that men don't understand what is noble and what is ignorant, though they always
talk about it.”
―
Leo Tolstoy
“Everything I know, I know because I love.”
―
Leo Tolstoy
“Not one word, not one gesture of yours shall I, could I, ever forget...”
―
Leo Tolstoy
“All happy families are alike; each unhappy family is unhappy in its own way.”
―
Leo Tolstoy
“No, you’re going in vain,” she mentally addressed a company in a coach-and-four who
were evidently going out of town for some merriment. “And the dog you’re taking with you
won’t help you. You won’t get away from yourselves.”
―
Leo Tolstoy
“Come, what did I say, repeat it? he would ask. But I could never repeat anything, so
ludicrous it seemed that he should talk to me, not of himself or me, but of something else, as
though it mattered what happened outside us. Only much later I began to have some slight
understanding of his cares and to be interested in them.”
―
Leo Tolstoy
“There lay between them, separating them, that same terrible line of the unknown and of
fear, like the line separating the living from the dead.”
―
Leo Tolstoy
“Death, the inevitable end of everything, confronted him for the first time with irresistible
force.
―
Leo Tolstoy
“In spite of death, he felt the need of life and love. He felt that love saved him from despair,
and that this love, under the menace of despair, had become still stronger and purer. The one
mystery of death, still unsolved, had scarcely passed before his eyes, when another mystery
had arisen, as insoluble, urging him to love and to life.”
―
Leo Tolstoy
“A wife's a worry, a non-wife's even worse.”
―
Leo Tolstoy
“He stepped down trying not to look long at her, as though she were the sun, yet he saw
her as one sees the sun, without looking.”
―
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
