“The whole world is divided for me into two parts: one is she, and there is all happiness, hope,
light; the other is where she is not, and there is dejection and darkness...”
―
Leo Tolstoy
“Pierre looked into the sky, into the depths of the retreating, twinkling stars. "And all this is
mine, and all this is in me, and all this is me!" thought Pierre. "And all this they've caught and
put in a shed and boarded it up!”
―
Leo Tolstoy
“They've got no idea what happiness is, they don't know that without this love there is no
happiness or unhappiness for us--there is no life.”
―
Leo Tolstoy
“Oh no, Papa, Kitty objected warmly. Varenka adores her. And besides, she does so much
good! Ask anyone you like! Everybody knows her and Aline Stah. Perhaps, he said, pressing
her arm with his elbow. But it is better to do good so that, ask whom you will, no one knows
anything about it.”
―
Leo Tolstoy
“I'll get angry in the same way with the coachman Ivan, argue in the same way, speak my
mind inappropriately, there will be the same wall between my soul's holy of holies and other
people, even my wife, I'll accuse her in the same way of my own fear and then regret it, I'll fail
in the same way to understand with my reason why I pray, and yet I will pray--but my life now,
my whole life, regardless of all that may happen to me, every minute of it, is not only not
meaningless, as it was before, but has the unquestionable meaning of the good which it is in
my power to put into it!”
―
Leo Tolstoy
“She was in that highly-wrought state when the reasoning powers act with great rapidity: the
state a man is in before a battle or a struggle, in danger, and at the decisive moments of life -
those moments when a man shows once and for all what he is worth, that his past was not
lived in vain but was a preparation for these moments.”
―
Leo Tolstoy
“As though tears were the indispensable oil without which the machinery of mutual
confidence could not run smoothly between the two sister, the sisters after their tears talked,
not of what was uppermost in their minds, but though they talked of outside matters, they
understood each other.”
―
Leo Tolstoy
“... in marriage the great thing was love, and that with love one would always be happy, for
happiness rests only on oneself.”
―
Leo Tolstoy
“I can't praise a young lady who is alive only when people are admiring her, but as soon as
she is left alone, collapses and finds nothing to her taste--one who is all for show and has no
resources in herself”
―
Leo Tolstoy
“Every lie is a poison; there are no harmless lies. Only the truth is safe. Only the truth gives
me consolation - it is the one unbreakable diamond.”
―
Leo Tolstoy
“... for nightinggales - we know - can’t live on fairytales.”
―
Leo Tolstoy
“It was all so strange, so unlike what he had been looking forward to.”
―
Leo Tolstoy
“And therefore the Christian, who is subject only to the inner divine law, not only cannot
carry out the enactments of the external law, when they are not in agreement with the divine
law of love which he acknowledges (as is usually the case with state obligations), he cannot
even recognize the duty of obedience to anyone or anything whatever, he cannot recognize
the duty of what is called allegiance.”
―
Leo Tolstoy
“To us, it is incomprehensible that millions of Christian men killed and tortured each other
because Napoleon was ambitious or Alexander was firm, or because England's policy was
astute or the Duke of Oldenburg was wronged. We cannot grasp what connection such
circumstances have the with the actual fact of slaughter and violence: why because the Duke
was wronged, thousands of men from the other side of Europe killed and ruined the people of
Smolensk and Moscow and were killed by them.”
―
Leo Tolstoy
“The assertion that you are in falsehood and I am in truth ist the most cruel thing one man
can say to another”
―
Leo Tolstoy
