“The worker picked up Pakhom’s spade, dug a grave, and buried him - six feet from head to
heel, exactly the amount of land a man needs.”
―
Leo Tolstoy
“Does it ever happen to you," Natasha said to her brother, when they had settled in the
sitting room, "does it ever happen to you that you feel there's nothing more - nothing; that
everything good has already happened? And it's not really boring, but sad?"
"As if it doesn't!" he said. "It's happened to me that everything's fine, everybody's merry, and it
suddenly comes into my head that it's all tiresome and we all ought to die....”
―
Leo Tolstoy
She had done all she could - she had run up to him and given herself up entirely, shyly,
blissfully. He put his arms around her and pressed his lips to her mouth that sought his kiss.”
―
Leo Tolstoy
“The latter part of her stay in Voronezh had been the happiest period in Princess Marya's
life. Her love for Rostov was not then a source of torment or agitation to her. That love had by
then filled her whole soul and become an inseparable part of herself, and she no longer
struggled against it. Of late Princess Marya was convinced- though she never clearly in so
many words admitted it to herself- that she loved and was beloved.”
―
Leo Tolstoy
“You say: I am not free. But I have raised and lowered my arm. Everyone understands that
this illogical answer is an irrefutable proof of freedom.”
―
Leo Tolstoy
“He walked down, for a long while avoiding looking at her as at the sun, but seeing her, as
one does the sun, without looking.”
―
Leo Tolstoy
“Morning or night, Friday or Sunday, made no difference, everything was the same: the
gnawing, excruciating, incessant pain; that awareness of life irrevocably passing but not yet
gone; that dreadful, loathsome death, the only reality, relentlessly closing in on him; and that
same endless lie. What did days, weeks, or hours matter?”
―
Leo Tolstoy
“A battle is won by the side that is absolutely determined to win. Why did we lose the battle
of Austerlitz? Our casualties were about the same as those of the French, but we had told
ourselves early in the day that the battle was lost, so it was lost.
―
Leo Tolstoy
“Patience is waiting. Not passively waiting. That is laziness. But to keep going when the
going is hard and slow - that is patience. The two most powerful warriors are patience and
time.”
―
Leo Tolstoy
“What's all this love of arguing? No one ever convinces anyone else.”
―
Leo Tolstoy
“He had lived (without being aware of it) on those spiritual truths that he had sucked in with
his mother's milk, but he had thought, not merely without recognition of these truths, but
studiously ignoring them. ”
―
Leo Tolstoy
“I don’t count life as life without love”
―
Leo Tolstoy
“Remember that there is only one important time and it is Now. The present moment is the
only time over which we have dominion. The most important person is always the person with
whom you are, who is right before you, for who knows if you will have dealings with any other
person in the future? The most important pursuit is making that person, the one standing at
you side, happy, for that alone is the pursuit of life.”
―
Leo Tolstoy
“It can't be that life is so senseless and horrible. But if it really has been so horrible and
senseless, why must I die and die in agony? There is something wrong!”
―
Leo Tolstoy
“The story of Ivan Ilyich life was of the simplest, most ordinary and therefore most terrible".
Tolstoy defines living an ordinary life as terrible - I really do have to agree!”
―
Leo Tolstoy
