“Natasha, in her lilac silk dress trimmed with black lace walked, as women can walk, with the more repose and stateliness the greater the pain and shame in her soul.”

Leo Tolstoy

“After dinner Natasha went to the clavichord, at Prince Andrey's request, and began singing. Prince Andrey stood at the window, talking to the ladies, and listened to her. In the middle of a phrase, Prince Andrey ceased speaking, and felt suddenly a lump in his throat from tears, the possibility of which he had never dreamed of in himself. He looked at Natasha singing, and something new and blissful stirred in his soul. He was happy, and at the same time he was sad. He certainly had nothing to weep about, but he was ready to weep. For what? For his past love? For the little princess? For his lost illusions? For his hopes for the future? Yes, and no. The chief thing which made him ready to weep was a sudden, vivid sense of the fearful contrast between something infinitely great and illimitable existing in him, and something limited and material, which he himself was, and even she was. This contrast made his heart ache, and rejoiced him while she was singing.”

Leo Tolstoy

“He felt now that he was not simply close to her, but that he did not know where he ended and she began.”

Leo Tolstoy

“There are people who, on meeting a successful rival, no matter in what, are at once disposed to turn their backs on everything good in him, and to see only what is bad. There are people, on the other hand, who desire above all to find in that lucky rival the qualities by which he has outstripped them, and seek with a throbbing ache at heart only what is good.”

Leo Tolstoy

“Just when the question of how to live had become clearer to him, a new insoluble problem presented itself - Death.”

Leo Tolstoy

“And once he had seen this, he could never again see it otherwise, just as we cannot reconstruct an illusion once it has been explained.”

Leo Tolstoy

“I did not myself know what I wanted: I feared life, desired to escape from it, yet still hoped something of it.”

Leo Tolstoy

“Everything I know...I know because I love"

Leo Tolstoy

Many families remain for years in the same place, though both husband and wife are sick of it, simply because there is neither complete division nor agreement between them.”

Leo Tolstoy

“either you are so underdeveloped that you can't see all that you can do, or you won't sacrifice your ease, your vanity, or whatever it is, to do it...”

Leo Tolstoy

“In everything, almost in everything, I wrote I was guided by the need of collecting ideas which, linked together, would be the expression of myself, though each individual idea, expressed separately in words, loses its meaning, is horribly debased when only one of the links, of which it forms a part, is taken by itself. But the interlinking of these ideas is not, I think, an intellectual process, but something else, and it is impossible to express the source of this interlinking directly in words; it can only be done indirectly by describing images, actions, and situations in words.”

Leo Tolstoy

“Levin had often noticed in arguments between even the most intelligent people that after enormous efforts, an enormous number of logical subtleties and words, the arguers would finally come to the awareness that what they had spent so long struggling to prove to each other had been known to them long, long before, from the beginning of the argument, but that they loved different things and therefore did not want to name what they loved, so as not to be challenged. He had often felt that sometimes during an argument you would understand what your opponent loves, and suddenly come to love the same thing yourself, and agree all at once, and then all reasonings would fall away as superfluous; and sometimes it was the other way round: you would finally say what you yourself love, for the sake of which you are inventing your reasonings, and if you happened to say it well and sincerely, the opponent would suddenly agree and stop arguing. That was the very thing he wanted to say.

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

“intriguing people have to invent a noxious, dangerous party...”

Leo Tolstoy

“The question was summed up for him thus: "If I do not accept the answers Christianity gives to the problems of my life, what answers do I accept?”

Leo Tolstoy


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