“But that had been grief--this was joy. Yet that grief and this joy were alike outside all the ordinary conditions of life; they were loopholes, as it were, in that ordinary life through which there came glimpses of something sublime. And in the contemplation of this sublime something the soul was exalted to inconceivable heights of which it had before had no conception, while reason lagged behind, unable to keep up with it.”

Leo Tolstoy

“But perhaps it is always so, that men form their conceptions from fictitious, conventional types, and then—all the combinations made—they are tired of the fictitious figures and begin to invent more natural, true figures.”

Leo Tolstoy

“Our existence is now so entirely in contradiction with the doctrine of Jesus, that only with the greatest difficulty can we understand its meaning. We have been so deaf to the rules of life that he has given us, to his explanations,—not only when he commands us not to kill, but when he warns us against anger, when he commands us not to resist evil, to turn the other cheek, to love our enemies; we are so accustomed to speak of a body of men especially organized for murder, as a Christian army, we are so accustomed to prayers addressed to the Christ for the assurance of victory, we who have made the sword, that symbol of murder, an almost sacred object (so that a man deprived of this symbol, of his sword, is a dishonored man); we are so accustomed, I say, to this, that the words of Jesus seem to us compatible with war. We say, "If he had forbidden it, he would have said so plainly." We forget that Jesus did not foresee that men having faith in his doctrine of humility, love, and fraternity, could ever, with calmness and premeditation, organize themselves for the murder of their brethren.”

Leo Tolstoy

“Pierre's insanity consisted in the fact that he did not wait, as before, for personal reasons, which he called people's merits, in order to love them, but love overflowed his heart, and, loving people without reason, he discovered the unquestionable reasons for which it was worth loving them”

Leo Tolstoy

“I know now that people only seem to live when they care only for themselves, and that it is by love for others that they really live. He who has Love has God in him, and is in God - - because God is Love. ”

Leo Tolstoy

“It was long before I could believe that human learning had no clear answer to this question. For a long time it seemed to me, as I listened to the gravity and seriousness wherewith Science affirmed its positions on matters unconnected with the problem of life, that I must have misunderstood something. For a long time I was timid in the presence in learning, and I fancied that the insufficiency of the answers which I received was not its fault, but was owing to my own gross ignorance, but this thing was not a joke or a pastime with me, but the business of my life, and I was at last forced, willy-nilly, to the conclusion that these questions of mine were the only legitimate questions underlying all knowledge, and that it was not I that was in fault in putting them, but science in pretending to have an answer for them.”

Leo Tolstoy

“True life is lived when tiny changes occur.”

Leo Tolstoy

“The animalism of the brute nature in man is disgusting,” he thought, “but as long as it remains in its naked form we observe it from the height of our spiritual life and despise it; and—whether one has fallen or resisted—one remains what one was before. But when that same animalism hides under a cloak of poetry and æsthetic feeling and demands our worship—then we are swallowed up by it completely and worship animalism, no longer distinguishing good from evil. Then it is awful!”

Leo Tolstoy

“There was no solution but that usual solution which life gives to all questions, even the most complex and insoluble. That answer one must live in the needs of one that - that is, forget oneself.”

Leo Tolstoy

“God knows, but He's waiting”

Leo Tolstoy

“To claim that the supernatural and irrational form the basic characteristics of religion is much the same as noticing only the rotten apples and then claiming that the basic features of the fruit named apple are a flaccid bitterness and a harmful effect produced in the stomach.”

Leo Tolstoy

“We should show life neither as it is or as it ought to be, but only as we see it in our dreams.”

Leo Tolstoy

“Her maternal instinct told her Natasha had too much of something, and because of this she would not be happy”

Leo Tolstoy

“He is not apprehended by reason, but by life.”

Leo Tolstoy

“Mathematics is the queen of disciplines.... it will drive the nonsense out of your head!”

Leo Tolstoy


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