“Universal military service may be compared to the efforts of a man to prop up his falling
house who so surrounds it and fills it with props and buttresses and planks and scaffolding
that he manages to keep the house standing only by making it impossible to live in it.”
―
Leo Tolstoy
“Pierre had for the first time experienced that strange and fascinating feeling in the
Slobodsky palace, when he suddenly felt that wealth and power and life, all that men build up
and guard with such effort ,is only worth anything through the joy with which it can all be cast
away.”
―
Leo Tolstoy
“I wrote everything into Anna Karenina, and nothing was left over.”
―
Leo Tolstoy
“You're not going to be different ... you're going to be the same as you've always been; with
doubts, everlasting dissatisfaction with yourself, vain efforts to amend, and falls, and
everlasting expectation, of a happiness which you won't get, and which isn't possible for you.”
―
Leo Tolstoy
“But our idea is that the wolves should be fed and the sheep kept safe. ”
―
Leo Tolstoy
“Though the doctors treated him, let his blood, and gave him medications to drink, he
nevertheless recovered.”
―
Leo Tolstoy
“But the princess had never seen the beautiful expression of her eyes; the expression that
came into them when she was not thinking of herself. As is the case with everyone, her face
assumed an affected, unnatural, ugly expression as soon as she looked in the looking glass.”
―
Leo Tolstoy
“He felt that now over his every word, his every deed, there was a judge, a judgment, which
was dearer to him than the judgments of all the people in the world. He spoke now, and along
with his words he considered the impression his words would make on Natasha. He did not
deliberately say what would be please her, but whatever he said, he judged himself from her
point of view.”
―
Leo Tolstoy
“Moreover, during his wife's confinement, something had happened that seemed
extraordinary to him. He, an unbeliever, had fallen into praying, and at the moment he prayed,
he believed. But that moment had passed, and he could not make his state of mind at that
moment fit into the rest of his life.”
―
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
“It seems as though mankind has forgotten the laws of its divine Saviour, Who preached
love and forgiveness of injuries—and that men attribute the greatest merit to skill in killing one
another.”
―
Leo Tolstoy
“The antagonism between life and conscience may be removed in two ways: by a change
of life or by a change of conscience.”
―
Leo Tolstoy
“We shall all of us die, so why should I grudge a little trouble?”
―
Leo Tolstoy
“after the murder of the duc there was one martyr more in heaven and one hero less on
earth”
―
Leo Tolstoy
