“Everything ends in death, everything. Death is terrible.”
―
Leo Tolstoy
“I have discovered nothing. I have only found out what I knew. I understand the force that in
the past gave me life, and now too gives me life. I have been set free from falsity, I have found
the Master.”
―
Leo Tolstoy
“Stepan Arkadyevitch had not chosen his political opinions or his views; these political
opinions and views had come to him of themselves, just as he did not choose the shapes of
his hat and coat, but simply took those that were being worn. ”
―
Leo Tolstoy
“Whatever question arose, a swarm of these drones, without having finished their buzzing
on a previous theme, flew over to the new one and by their hum drowned and obscured the
voices of those who were disputing honestly.”
―
Leo Tolstoy
“Human science fragments everything in order to understand it, kills everything in order to
examine it. ”
―
Leo Tolstoy
“The most important acts, both for the one who accomplishes them and for his fellow
creatures, are those that have remote consequences.”
―
Leo Tolstoy
“She was as easy to recognize in that crowd as a rose among nettles.”
―
Leo Tolstoy
“Kind people help each other even without noticing that they are doing so, and evil people
act against each other on purpose. —CHINESE PROVERB”
―
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
“...there was apparent in all a sort of anxiety, a softening of the heart, and a consciousness
of some great, unfathomable mystery being accomplished... the most solemn mystery in the
world was being accomplished. Evening passed, night came on. And the feeling of suspenseand softening of the heart before the unfathomable did not wane, but grew more intense. No
one slept.”
―
Leo Tolstoy
“He looked at her as a man might look at a faded flower he had plucked, in which it was
difficult for him to trace the beauty that had made him pick and so destroy it”
―
Leo Tolstoy
“I am always with myself, and it is I who am my tormentor.”
―
Leo Tolstoy
“He meditated on the use to which he should put all the energy of youth which comes to a
man only once in life. Should he devote this power, which is not the strength of intellect or
heart or education, but an urge which once spent can never return, the power given to a man
once only to make himself, or even – so it seems to him at the time – the universe into
anything he wishes: should he devote it to art, to science, to love, or to practical activities?
True, there are people who never have this urge: at the outset of life they place their necks
under the first yoke that offers itself, and soberly toil away in it to the end of their days.”
―
Leo Tolstoy
“The difference between what he had been then and what he now was, was
enormous...Then he was free and fearless...now he felt himself caught in the meshes of a
stupid, empty, valueless, frivolous life...He remembered how proud he was at one time of his
straightforwardness, how he had made a rule of always speaking the truth...and he was now
sunk deep in lies...lies considered as truth by all who surrounded him.”
―
Leo Tolstoy
