“All the diversity, all the charm, and all the beauty of life are made up of light and shade.”
―
Leo Tolstoy
“And he has to live like this on the edge of destruction, alone, with nobody at all to
understand or pity him”
―
Leo Tolstoy
“Lord have mercy! Pardon and help us!" he repeated the words that suddenly and
unexpectedly sprang to his lips. And he, an unbeliever, repeated those words not with his lips
only. At that instant he knew that neither his doubts nor the impossibility of believing with his
reason- of which he was conscious- all prevented his appealing to God. It all flew off like dust.
To whom should he appeal, if not to Him in whose hands he felt himself, his soul, and his love,
to be?
―
Leo Tolstoy
“The pleasure lies not in discovering truth, but in searching for it.”
―
Leo Tolstoy
“What counts in making a happy marriage is not so much how compatible you are but how you
deal with incompatibility.
―
Leo Tolstoy
“Everything I know, I know because of love”
―
Leo Tolstoy
“The only absolute knowledge attainable by man is that life is meaningless.”
―
Leo Tolstoy
“At one time,' Golenishchev continued, either not observing or not willing to observe that
both Anna and Vronsky wanted to speak, 'at one time a freethinker was a man who had been
brought up in the conception of religion, law, and morality, who reached freethought only after
conflict and difficulty. But now a new type of born freethinkers has appeared, who grow up
without so much as hearing that there used to be laws of morality, or religion, that authorities
existed. They grow up in ideas of negation in everything -- in other words, utter savages.”
―
Leo Tolstoy
“Everything I know...I know because I love"
―
Leo Tolstoy
“War is the most painful act of subjection to the laws of God that can be required of the
human will.”
―
Leo Tolstoy
“But any acquisition that doesn't correspond to the labour expended is dishonest”
―
Leo Tolstoy
“He was afraid of defiling the love which filled his soul.”
―
Leo Tolstoy
“I can’t think of you and myself apart. You and I are the same to me”
―
Leo Tolstoy
“He felt that now over his every word, his every deed, there was a judge, a judgment, which
was dearer to him than the judgments of all the people in the world. He spoke now, and along
with his words he considered the impression his words would make on Natasha. He did not
deliberately say what would be please her, but whatever he said, he judged himself from her
point of view.”
―
Leo Tolstoy
“Where did I get it from? Was it by reason that I attained to the knowledge that I must love
my neighbour and not throttle him? They told me so when I was a child, and I gladly believed
it, because they told me what was already in my soul. But who discovered it? Not reason!
Reason has discovered the struggle for existence and the law that I must throttle all those who
hinder the satisfaction of my desires. That is the deduction reason makes. But the law of
loving others could not be discovered by reason, because it is unreasonable.”
―
Leo Tolstoy
