“If everyone fought only for his own convictions, there would be no wars.”
―
Leo Tolstoy
“What am I coming for?" he repeated, looking straight into her eyes. "You know that I have
come to be where you are," he said; "I can't help it.”
―
Leo Tolstoy
“It would be good," thought Prince Andrei, glancing at the little image that his sister had
hung around his neck with such reverence and emotion, "It would be good if everything were
as clear and simple as it seems to Princess Marya . How good it would be to know where to
seek help in this life, and what to expect after it, beyond the grave! How happy and at peace I
should be if I could now say:" Lord have mercy on me!... But to whom should I say this? To
some power--- indefinable and incomprehensible, to which I not only cannot appeal, but which
I cannot express in words---The Great All or Nothing," he said to himself, "or to that God who
has been sewn into this amulet by Marya? There is nothing certain, nothing except the
nothingness of everything that is comprehensible to me, and the greatness of something
incomprehensible but all important!”
―
Leo Tolstoy
“He soon felt that the realization of his desire had given him only a grain of the mountain of
happiness he had expected. It showed him the eternal error people make in imagining that
happiness is the realization of desires.”
―
Leo Tolstoy
“Sometimes she did not know what she feared, what she desired: whether she feared or
desired what had been or what would be, and precisely what she desired, she did not know.”
―
Leo Tolstoy
“What energy!' I thought. 'Man has conquered everything, and destroyed millions of plants,
yet this one won't submit.”
―
Leo Tolstoy
“The feelings resembled memories; but memories of what? Apparently one can remember
things that have never happened.”
―
Leo Tolstoy
“For a few seconds they looked silently into each other's eyes, and the distant and
impossible suddenly became near, possible, and inevitable.”
―
Leo Tolstoy
“but that what was for him the greatest and most cruel injustice appeared to others a quite
ordinary occurrence.”
―
Leo Tolstoy
“Writing laws is easy, but governing is difficult.”
―
Leo Tolstoy
“The only absolute knowledge attainable by man is that life is meaningless.”
―
Leo Tolstoy
“The social conditions of life can only be improved by people exercising self-restraint.”
―
Leo Tolstoy
“She was utterly unlike what she had been when he first saw her. Both morally and
physically she had changed for the worse. [...] He looked at her as a man looks at a faded
flower he has gathered, with difficulty recognizing in it the beauty for which he picked and
ruined it.”
―
Leo Tolstoy
“You can love a person dear to you with a human love, but an enemy can only be loved with
divine love.”
―
Leo Tolstoy
“I killed the wife when I first tasted sensual joys without love, and then it was that I killed my
wife.”
―
Leo Tolstoy
