“Consciously a man lives on his own account in freedom of willbut he serves as an
unconscious instrument in bringing about the historical ends of humanity. An act he has once
committed is irrecvocable, and that act of his, coinciding in time with millions of acts of others,
has an historical value... 'The hearts of kinds are in the hand of God.' The king is the slave of
history... Every action that seems to them an act of their own freewill, is in an historical sense
not free at all, but in bondage to the whole course of previous history, and predestined from all
eternity.”
―
Leo Tolstoy
“In infinite time, in infinite matter, in infinite space, is formed a bubble organism, and that
bubble lasts a while and bursts, and that bubble is Me.”
―
Leo Tolstoy
“nothing has contributed so much to the obscuring of Christian truth in the eyes of the
heathen, and has hindered so much the diffusion of Christianity through the world, as the
disregard of [non-resistance] by men calling themselves Christians, and the permission of war
and violence to Christians.
―
Leo Tolstoy
“How can one be well...when one suffers morally?”
―
Leo Tolstoy
“I don't think badly of people. I like everybody, and I'm sorry for everybody.”
―
Leo Tolstoy
“I know that most men, including those at ease with problems of the greatest complexity,
can seldom accept even the simplest and most obvious truth if it be such as would oblige them
to admit the falsity of conclusions which they have delighted in explaining to colleagues, which
they have proudly taught to others, and which they have woven, thread by thread, into the
fabric of their lives.”
―
Leo Tolstoy
“If so many men, so many minds, certainly so many hearts, so many kinds of love.”
―
Leo Tolstoy
“A writer is dear and necessary for us only in the measure of which he reveals to us the
inner workings of his very soul.”
―
Leo Tolstoy
“- Every girl is proud of an offer, Yes, every girl, but not she”
―
Leo Tolstoy
“I work, I want to do something, but I had forgotten it must all end; I had forgotten--death.”
―
Leo Tolstoy
“I'm like a starving man who has been given food. Maybe he's cold, and his clothes are torn,
and he's ashamed, but he's not unhappy.”
―
Leo Tolstoy
“All families are happy, all families are alike.”
―
Leo Tolstoy
“Just when the question of how to live had become clearer to him, a new insoluble problem
presented itself - Death.”
―
Leo Tolstoy
“I wanted movement and not a calm course of existence. I wanted excitement and danger and
the chance to sacrifice myself for my love.”
―
Leo Tolstoy
“The march of humanity, springing as it does from an infinite multitude of individual wills, is
continuous.”
―
Leo Tolstoy
