“-Why are you so sad? Because you speak to me in words and I look at you with feelings.”
―
Leo Tolstoy
“wisdom needs no violence...As it is we have played at war – that’s what’s vile! We play at
magnanimity and all that stuff. Such magnanimity and sensibility are like the magnanimity and
sensibility of a lady who faints when she sees a calf being killed: she is so kindhearted that
she can’t look at blood, but enjoys eating the calf served up with sauce...If there was none of
this magnanimity in war, we should go to war only when it was worth while going to certain
death, as it is now. Then there would not be war because Paul Ivanovich had offended
Michael Ivanovich.”
―
Leo Tolstoy
“I must ask what it is you want of me?"
"What can I want? All I can want is that you should not desert me, as you think of doing," she
said, understanding all he had not uttered. "But that I don't want; that's secondary. I want love,
and there is none. So then all is over.”
―
Leo Tolstoy
“To say that a work of art is good, but incomprehensible to the majority of men, is the same
as saying of some kind of food that it is very good but that most people can’t eat it.”
―
Leo Tolstoy
“When the examination was over, the doctor looked at his watch, and then Praskovya
Fyodorovna informed Ivan Ilyich that it must of course be as he liked, but she had sent today
for a celebrated doctor, and that he would examine him, and have a consultation with Mihail
Danilovich (that was the name of his regular doctor). 'Don't oppose it now, please. This I'm
doing entirely for my own sake,' she said ironically, meaning it to be understood that she was
doing it all for his sake, and was only saying this to give him no right to refuse her request. He
lay silent, knitting his brows. He felt that he was hemmed in by such a tangle of falsity that it
was hard to disentangle anything from it. Everything she did for him was entirely for her own
sake, and she told him she was doing for her own sake what she actually was doing for her
own sake as something so incredible that he would take it as meaning the opposite.”
―
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
“But the older he grew and the more intimately he came to know his brother, the oftener the
thought occurred to him that the power of working for the general welfare – a power of whichhe felt himself entirely destitute – was not a virtue but rather a lack of something: not a lack of
kindly honesty and noble desires and tastes, but a lack of the power of living, of what is called
heart – the aspiration which makes a man choose one out of all the innumerable paths of life
that present themselves, and desire that alone.”
―
Leo Tolstoy
"The most utterly loathsome and coarse; I can't tell you. It's not unhappiness, or low spirits,
but much worse. As though everything that was good in me was all hidden away, and nothing
was left but the most loathsome.”
―
Leo Tolstoy
“The more is given the less the people will work for themselves, and the less they work the
more their poverty will increase.”
―
Leo Tolstoy
“So they are even more frightened than we are,' he thought. 'Why, is this all that's meant by
heroism? And did I do it for the sake of my country? And was he to blame with his dimple and
his blue eyes? How frightened he was! He thought I was going to kill him. Why should I kill
him? My hand trembled. And they have given me the St. George's Cross. I can't make it out, I
can't make it out!”
―
Leo Tolstoy
“Davout looked up and gazed intently at him. For some seconds they looked at one
another, and that look saved Pierre. Apart from conditions of war and law, that look
established human relations between the two men. At that moment an immense number of
things passed dimly through both their minds, and they realized that they were both children of
humanity and were brothers.”
―
Leo Tolstoy
“How can one be well...when one suffers morally?”
―
Leo Tolstoy
“Kitty got up to fetch a table, and, as she passed, her eyes met Levin's. She felt for him with
her whole heart, the more because she was pitying him for a suffering of which she was
herself the cause. "If you can forgive me, forgive me," said her eyes, "I am so happy.""I hate them all, and you, and myself," his eyes responded, and he took up his hat. But he was
not destined to escape. Just as they were arranging themselves round the table, and Levin
was on the point of retiring, the old Prince came in, and, after greeting the ladies, addressed
Levin.”
―
Leo Tolstoy
“A man's every action is inevitably conditioned by what surrounds him and by his own
body.”
―
Leo Tolstoy
“How good it would be to know where to look for help in this life and what to expect after it,
there, beyond the grave! How happy and calm I'd be, if I could say now: Lord, have mercy on
me! ... But to whom shall I say it? Either it is an indefinable, unfathomable power, which I not
only cannot address, but which I cannot express in words - the great all or nothing...or it is that
God of whom Princess Marya has sewn in here, in this amulet? Nothing, nothing is certain,
except the insignificance of everything I can comprehend and the grandeur of something
incomprehensible but most important!
―
Leo Tolstoy
