“The subject of history is the life of peoples and of humanity. To catch and pin down in
words--that is, to describe directly the life, not only of humanity, but even of a single people,
appears to be impossible.”
―
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
“When one's head is gone one doesn't weep over one's hair!”
―
Leo Tolstoy
“Everyone thinks of changing the world, but no one thinks of changing himself.”
―
Leo Tolstoy
“There can be no peace for us, only misery, and the greatest happiness.”
―
Leo Tolstoy
“What's all this love of arguing? No one ever convinces anyone else.”
―
Leo Tolstoy
“...the aim of civilization is to translate everything into enjoyment.”
―
Leo Tolstoy
“kitty always assumed the most beautiful things about people”
―
Leo Tolstoy
“The march of humanity, springing as it does from an infinite multitude of individual wills, is
continuous.”
―
Leo Tolstoy
“Every man experiences what you call love for every pretty woman and least of all for his
wife. That is what the proverb says, and it is a true one. "Another's wife is a swan, but one's
own is bitter wormwood.”
―
Leo Tolstoy
“There was no solution, but that universal solution which life gives to all questions, even the
most complex and insoluble. That answer is: one must live in the needs of the day—that is,
forget oneself. To forget himself in sleep was impossible now, at least till nighttime; he could
not go back now to the music sung by the decanter-women; so he must forget himself in the
dream of daily life.”
―
Leo Tolstoy
“I killed the wife when I first tasted sensual joys without love, and then it was that I killed my
wife.”
―
Leo Tolstoy
“He knew that Vronsky could not be prevented from amusing himself with painting; he knew
that he and all dilettanti had a perfect right to paint what they liked, but it was distasteful to
him. A man could not be prevented from making himself a big wax doll, and kissing it. But if
the man were to come with the doll and sit before a man in love, and began caressing his doll
as the lover caressed the woman he loved, it would be distasteful to the lover. Just such a
distasteful sensation was what Mihailov felt at the sight of Vronsky’s painting: he felt it both
ludicrous and irritating, both pitiable and offensive.”
―
Leo Tolstoy
“but that what was for him the greatest and most cruel injustice appeared to others a quite
ordinary occurrence.”
―
Leo Tolstoy
