“oh God! what am I to do if I love nothing but fame and men's esteem?”
―
Leo Tolstoy
“There was no solution but that usual solution which life gives to all questions, even the
most complex and insoluble. That answer one must live in the needs of one that - that is,
forget oneself.”
―
Leo Tolstoy
“In actuality, it was like the homes of all people who are not really rich but who want to look
rich, and therefore end up looking like one another: it had damasks, ebony, plants, carpets,
and bronzes, everything dark and gleaming—all the effects a certain class of people produce
so as to look like people of a certain class. And his place looked so much like the others that it
would never have been noticed, though it all seemed quite exceptional to him.”
―
Leo Tolstoy
“How good is it to remember one's insignificance: that of a man among billions of men, of
an animal amid billions of animals; and one's abode, the earth, a little grain of sand in
comparison with Sirius and others, and one's life span in comparison with billions on billions of
ages. There is only one significance, you are a worker. The assignment is inscribed in your
reason and heart and expressed clearly and comprehensibly by the best among the beings
similar to you. The reward for doing the assignment is immediately within you. But what the
significance of the assignment is or of its completion, that you are not given to know, nor do
you need to know it. It is good enough as it is. What else could you desire?”
―
Leo Tolstoy
“Well, what is that to me? I can't see her!" she cried.”
―
Leo Tolstoy
“Happiness consists in always aspiring perfection, the pause in any level in perfection is the
pause of happiness”
―
Leo Tolstoy
“But that's the whole aim of civilization: to make everything a source of enjoyment.”
―
Leo Tolstoy
“Ah, if everyone was as sensitive as you! There's no girl who hasn't gone through that. And
it's all so unimportant!”
―
Leo Tolstoy
“God gave the day, God gave the strength.”
―
Leo Tolstoy
“Woman is deprived of rights from lack of education, and the lack of education results from
the absence of rights. We must not forget that the subjection of women is so complete, and
dates from such ages back that we are often unwilling to recognise the gulf that separates
them from us.”
―
Leo Tolstoy
“That which constitutes the cause of the economic poverty of our age is what the English
call over-production (which means that a mass of things are made which are of no use to
anybody, and with which nothing can be done).”
―
Leo Tolstoy
“If we admit that human life can be ruled by reason, then all possibility of life is destroyed.”
―
Leo Tolstoy
“The very nastiest and coarsest, I can't tell you. It is not grief, not dullness, but much worse.
It is as if all that was good in me had hidden itself, and only what is horrid remains.
―
Leo Tolstoy
“A thought can advance your life in the right direction only when it answers questions which
were asked by your soul. A thought which was first borrowed from someone else and then
accepted by your mind and memory does not really much influence your life, and sometimes
leads you in the wrong direction. Read less, study less, but think more.
Learn, both from your teachers and from the books which you read, only those things which
you really need and which you really want to know.”
―
Leo Tolstoy
“Because of the self-confidence with which he had spoken, no one could tell whether what he
said was very clever or very stupid.
―
Leo Tolstoy
