“One of the first conditions of happiness is that the link between Man and Nature shall not
be broken.”
―
Leo Tolstoy
“The Bible legend tells us that the absence of toil - idleness - was a condition of the first
man's state of bliss before the Fall. This love of idleness has remained the same in the fallen
man, but the curse still lies heavy on the human race....because our moral nature is such that
we are unable to be idle and at peace.”
―
Leo Tolstoy
“The further one goes, the better the land seems. ”
―
Leo Tolstoy
“Ivan Ilych's life had been most simple and most ordinary and therefore most terrible.”
―
Leo Tolstoy
“So that's what it is!" he suddenly exclaimed aloud. "What joy!”
―
Leo Tolstoy
“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
“There are two sides to the life of every man, his individual life which is the more free the
more abstract it's interests, and his elemental swarm-life in which he inevitably obeys laws laid
down for him”
―
Leo Tolstoy
“Happiness does not depend on outward things, but on the way we see them.”
―
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
“There is no significant idea which cannot be explained to an intelligent twelve year old boy
in fifteen minutes.”
―
Leo Tolstoy
“Let fear once get possession of the soul, and it does not readily yield its place to another
sentiment.”
―
Leo Tolstoy
“Without the support from religion--remember, we talked about it--no father, using only his
own resources, would be able to bring up a child.”
―
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
“If so many men, so many minds, certainly so many hearts, so many kinds of love.”
―
Leo Tolstoy
