Count Lev Nikolayevich Tolstoy, usually referred to in English as Leo Tolstoy, was a Russian writer regarded as one of the greatest and most influential authors of all time. He received nominations for the Nobel Prize in Literature every year from 1902 to 1906 and for the Nobel Peace Prize in 1901, 1902, and 1909.
Leo Tolstoy Quotes
1. “Everyone thinks of changing the world, but no one thinks of changing himself.”
― Leo Tolstoy
2. “All happy families are alike; each unhappy family is unhappy in its own way.”
― Leo Tolstoy
3. “If you look for perfection, you’ll never be content.”
― Leo Tolstoy
4. “I think… if it is true that
there are as many minds as there
are heads, then there are as many
kinds of love as there are hearts.”
― Leo Tolstoy
5. “It is amazing how complete is the delusion that beauty is goodness.”
― Leo Tolstoy
6. “He stepped down, trying not to look long at her, as if she were the sun, yet he saw her, like the sun, even without looking.”
― Leo Tolstoy
7. “Respect was invented to cover the empty place where love should be.”
― Leo Tolstoy
8. “We can know only that we know nothing. And that is the highest degree of human wisdom.”
― Leo Tolstoy
9. “Only people who are capable of loving strongly can also suffer great sorrow, but this same necessity of loving serves to counteract their grief and heals them.”
― Leo Tolstoy
10. “If, then, I were asked for the most important advice I could give, that which I considered to be the most useful to the men of our century, I should simply say: in the name of God, stop a moment, cease your work, look around you.”
― Leo Tolstoy
11. “If you want to be happy, be.”
― Tolstoy Leo
12. “Spring is the time of plans and projects.”
― Leo Tolstoy
13.“Is it really possible to tell someone else what one feels?”
― Leo Tolstoy
14. “Nothing is so necessary for a young man as the company of intelligent women.”
― Leo Tolstoy
14. “A quiet secluded life in the country, with the possibility of being useful to people to whom it is easy to do good, and who are not accustomed to have it done to them; then work which one hopes may be of some use; then rest, nature, books, music, love for one’s neighbor — such is my idea of happiness.”
― Leo Tolstoy
15. “Rummaging in our souls, we often dig up something that ought to have lain there unnoticed.”
― Leo Tolstoy
16.“When you love someone, you love the person as they are, and not as you’d like them to be.”
― Leo Tolstoy
17. “In the name of God, stop a moment, cease your work, look around you.”
― Leo Tolstoy
18. “Freethinkers are those who are willing to use their minds without prejudice and without fearing to understand things that clash with their own customs, privileges, or beliefs. This state of mind is not common, but it is essential for right thinking…”
― Leo Tolstoy
19. “I’ve always loved you, and when you love someone, you love the whole person, just as he or she is, and not as you would like them to be.”
― Leo Tolstoy
20. “Wrong does not cease to be wrong because the majority share in it.”
― Leo Tolstoy
21. “The two most powerful warriors are patience and time.”
― Leo Tolstoy
22. “Be bad, but at least don’t be a liar, a deceiver!”
― Leo Tolstoy
23. “Love. The reason I dislike that word is that it means too much for me, far more than you can understand.”
― Leo Tolstoy
24. “The strongest of all warriors are these two — Time and Patience.”
― Leo Tolstoy
25. “All the variety, all the charm, all the beauty of life is made up of light and shadow.”
― Leo Tolstoy
26. “If everyone fought for their own convictions there would be no war.”
― Leo Tolstoy
27. “Anything is better than lies and deceit!”
― Leo Tolstoy
28. “A man can live and be healthy without killing animals for food; therefore, if he eats meat, he participates in taking animal life merely for the sake of his appetite. And to act so is immoral.”
― Leo Tolstoy
29. “Boredom: the desire for desires.”
― Leo Tolstoy
30. “There is no greatness where there is not simplicity, goodness, and truth.”
― Leo Tolstoy
31. “I always loved you, and if one loves anyone, one loves the whole person, just as they are and not as one would like them to be. -Dolly”
― Leo Tolstoy
32. “Love is life. All, everything that I understand, I understand only because I love. Everything is, everything exists, only because I love. Everything is united by it alone. Love is God, and to die means that I, a particle of love, shall return to the general and eternal source.”
― Leo Tolstoy
33. “All great literature is one of two stories; a man goes on a journey or a stranger comes to town.”
― Leo Tolstoy
34. “Muhammad has always been standing higher than the Christianity. He does not consider god as a human being and never makes himself equal to God. Muslims worship nothing except God and Muhammad is his Messenger. There is no any mystery and secret in it.”
― Leo Tolstoy
35. “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
36. “All the girls in the world were divided into two classes: one class included all the girls in the world except her, and they had all the usual human feelings and were very ordinary girls; while the other class -herself alone- had no weaknesses and was superior to all humanity.”
― Leo Tolstoy
37. “it’s much better to do good in a way that no one knows anything about it.”
― Leo Tolstoy
38. “If you love me as you say you do,’ she whispered, ‘make it so that I am at peace.”
― Leo Tolstoy
39. “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
40. “Pierre was right when he said that one must believe in the possibility of happiness in order to be happy, and I now believe in it. Let the dead bury the dead, but while I’m alive, I must live and be happy.”
― Leo Tolstoy
41. “The best stories don’t come from “good vs. bad” but “good vs. good.”
― Leo Tolstoy
42. “Happiness does not depend on outward things, but on the way we see them.”
― Leo Tolstoy
43. “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
44. “You can love a person dear to you with a human love, but an enemy can only be loved with divine love.”
― Leo Tolstoy
45. “It’s not given to people to judge what’s right or wrong. People have eternally been mistaken and will be mistaken, and in nothing more than in what they consider right and wrong.”
― Leo Tolstoy
46. “But I’m glad you’ll see me as I am. Above all, I wouldn’t want people to think that I want to prove anything. I don’t want to prove anything, I just want to live; to cause no evil to anyone but myself. I have that right, haven’t I?”
― Leo Tolstoy
47. “But the law of loving others could not be discovered by reason, because it is unreasonable.”
― Leo Tolstoy
48. “If we admit that human life can be ruled by reason, then all possibility of life is destroyed.”
― Leo Tolstoy
49. “He soon felt that the fulfillment of his desires gave him only one grain of the mountain of happiness he had expected. This fulfillment showed him the eternal error men make in imagining that their happiness depends on the realization of their desires.”
― Leo Tolstoy
50 “It’s hard to love a woman and do anything.”
― Leo Tolstoy
51. “True life is lived when tiny changes occur.”
― Leo Tolstoy
52. “We are asleep until we fall in Love!”
― Leo Tolstoy
53. “Seize the moments of happiness, love and be loved! That is the only reality in the world, all else is folly. It is the one thing we are interested in here.”
― Leo Tolstoy
54. “What counts in making a happy marriage is not so much how compatible you are but how you deal with incompatibility.”
― Leo Tolstoy
55. “He felt now that he was not simply close to her, but that he did not know where he ended and she began.”
― Leo Tolstoy
56. “I often think that men don’t understand what is noble and what is ignorant, though they always talk about it.”
― Leo Tolstoy
57. “I simply want to live; to cause no evil to anyone but myself.”
― Leo Tolstoy
58. “Everything I know, I know because of love.”
― Leo Tolstoy
59. “Love those you hate you.”
― Leo Tolstoy
60. “Not one word, not one gesture of yours shall I, could I, ever forget…”
― Leo Tolstoy
61. “Something magical has happened to me: like a dream when one feels frightened and creepy, and suddenly wakes up to the knowledge that no such terrors exist. I have wakened up.”
― Leo Tolstoy
62. “He was afraid of defiling the love which filled his soul.”
― Leo Tolstoy
63. “A man is like a fraction whose numerator is what he is and whose denominator is what he thinks of himself. The larger the denominator, the smaller the fraction.”
― Leo Tolstoy
64. “Yes, love, …but not the love that loves for something, to gain something, or because of something, but that love that I felt for the first time, when dying, I saw my enemy and yet loved him. I knew that feeling of love which is the essence of the soul, for which no object is needed. And I know that blissful feeling now too. To love one’s neighbours; to love one’s enemies. To love everything – to Love God in all His manifestations. Some one dear to one can be loved with human love; but an enemy can only be loved with divine love. And that was why I felt such joy when I felt that I loved that man. What happened to him? Is he alive? …Loving with human love, one may pass from love to hatred; but divine love cannot change. Nothing, not even death, can shatter it. It is the very nature of the soul. And how many people I have hated in my life. And of all people none I have loved and hated more than her…. If it were only possible for me to see her once more… once, looking into those eyes to say…”
― Leo Tolstoy
65. “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
66. “I wanted movement and not a calm course of existence. I wanted excitement and danger and the chance to sacrifice myself for my love.”
― Leo Tolstoy
67. “All the diversity, all the charm, and all the beauty of life are made up of light and shade.”
― Leo Tolstoy
68. “Whatever our fate is or may be, we have made it and do not complain of it.”
― Leo Tolstoy
69. “Man cannot possess anything as long as he fears death. But to him who does not fear it, everything belongs. If there was no suffering, man would not know his limits, would not know himself. ”
― Leo Tolstoy
70. “To get rid of an enemy one must love him. ”
― Leo Tolstoy
71. “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
72. “I’m like a starving man who has been given food. Maybe he’s cold, and his clothes are torn, and he’s ashamed, but he’s not unhappy.”
― Leo Tolstoy
73. “What a strange illusion it is to suppose that beauty is goodness.”
― Leo Tolstoy
74. “He looked at her as a man might look at a faded flower he had plucked, in which it was difficult for him to trace the beauty that had made him pick and so destroy it”
― Leo Tolstoy
75. “Can it be that I have not lived as one ought?” suddenly came into his head. “But how not so, when I’ve done everything as it should be done?”
― Leo Tolstoy
76. “How can one be well…when one suffers morally?”
― Leo Tolstoy
77. “Every heart has its own skeletons.”
― Leo Tolstoy
78. “They say: sufferings are misfortunes,” said Pierre. ‘But if at once this minute, I was asked, would I remain what I was before I was taken prisoner, or go through it all again, I should say, for God’s sake let me rather be a prisoner and eat horseflesh again. We imagine that as soon as we are torn out of our habitual path all is over, but it is only the beginning of something new and good. As long as there is life, there is happiness. There is a great deal, a great deal before us.”
― Leo Tolstoy
79. “A man on a thousand mile walk has to forget his goal and say to himself every morning, ‘Today I’m going to cover twenty-five miles and then rest up and sleep.”
― Leo Tolstoy
80. “Human science fragments everything in order to understand it, kills everything in order to examine it. ”
― Leo Tolstoy
81. “He stepped down, avoiding any long look at her as one avoids long looks at the sun, but seeing her as one sees the sun, without looking.”
― Leo Tolstoy
82. “I sit on a man’s back choking him and making him carry me, and yet assure myself and others that I am sorry for him and wish to lighten his load by all means possible… except by getting off his back.”
― Leo Tolstoy
83. “She had no need to ask why he had come. She knew as certainly as if he had told her that he was here to be where she was.”
― Leo Tolstoy
84. “Everything intelligent is so boring.”
― Leo Tolstoy
85. “It’s all God’s will: you can die in your sleep, and God can spare you in battle.”
― Leo Tolstoy
86. “There are no conditions to which a person cannot grow accustomed, especially if he sees that everyone around him lives in the same way.”
― Leo Tolstoy
87. “The only absolute knowledge attainable by man is that life is meaningless.”
― Leo Tolstoy
88. “Happiness is an allegory, unhappiness a story.”
― Leo Tolstoy
89. “The most difficult subjects can be explained to the most slow-witted man if he has not formed any idea of them already; but the simplest thing cannot be made clear to the most intelligent man if he is firmly persuaded that he knows already, without a shadow of doubt, what is laid before him.”
― Leo Tolstoy
90. “Kings are the slaves of history.”
― Leo Tolstoy
91. “Music is the shorthand of emotion”
― Leo Tolstoy
92. “Which is worse? the wolf who cries before eating the lamb or the wolf who does not.”
― Leo Tolstoy
93. “Life did not stop, and one had to live.”
― Leo Tolstoy
94. “Doctoring her seemed to her as absurd as putting together the pieces of a broken vase. Her heart was broken. Why would they try to cure her with pills and powders?”
― Leo Tolstoy
95. “Instead of going to Paris to attend lectures, go to the public library, and you won’t come out for twenty years, if you really wish to learn.”
― Leo Tolstoy
96. “Everything depends on upbringing. ”
― Leo Tolstoy
97. “Pure and complete sorrow is as impossible as pure and complete joy.”
― Leo Tolstoy
98. “A Frenchman’s self-assurance stems from his belief that he is mentally and physically irresistibly fascinating to both men and women. An Englishman’s self-assurance is founded on his being a citizen of the best organized state in the world and on the fact that, as an Englishman, he always knows what to do, and that whatever he does as an Englishman is unquestionably correct. An Italian is self-assured because he is excitable and easily forgets. A Russian is self-assured simply because he knows nothing and does not want to know anything, since he does not believe in the possibility of knowing anything fully.”
― Leo Tolstoy
99. “We walked to meet each other up at the time of our love and then we have been irresistibly drifting in different directions, and there’s no altering that.”
― Leo Tolstoy
100. “To tell the truth is very difficult, and young people are rarely capable of it.”
― Leo Tolstoy
101. “He went down trying not to look long at her, as though she were the sun, but he saw her, as one sees the sun, without looking.”
― Leo Tolstoy
102. “God is the same everywhere.”
― Leo Tolstoy
103. “Here I am alive, and it’s not my fault, so I have to try and get by as best I can without hurting anybody until death takes over.”
― Leo Tolstoy
104. “He could not be mistaken. There were no other eyes like those in the world. There was only one creature in the world who could concentrate for him all the brightness and meaning of life. It was she. It was Kitty.”
― Leo Tolstoy
105. “And you know, there’s less charm in life when you think about death–but it’s more peaceful.”
― Leo Tolstoy
106. “My principal sin is doubt. I doubt everything, and am in doubt most of the time.”
― Leo Tolstoy
107. “Morning or night, Friday or Sunday, made no difference, everything was the same: the gnawing, excruciating, incessant pain; that awareness of life irrevocably passing but not yet gone; that dreadful, loathsome death, the only reality, relentlessly closing in on him; and that same endless lie. What did days, weeks, or hours matter?”
― Leo Tolstoy
108. “As long as there are slaughter houses there will always be battlefields.”
― Leo Tolstoy
109. “There can be no peace for us, only misery, and the greatest happiness.”
― Leo Tolstoy
110. “One must be cunning and wicked in this world.”
― Leo Tolstoy
111. “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. And in spite of this he felt that then, when his love was stronger, he could, if he had greatly wished it, have torn that love out of his heart; but now when as at that moment it seemed to him he felt no love for her, he knew that what bound him to her could not be broken.”
― Leo Tolstoy
112. “The Kingdom of God is Within You,”
― Leo Tolstoy
113. “In the midst of winter, I find within me the invisible summer…”
― Leo Tolstoy
114. “All we can know is that we know nothing. And that’s the height of human wisdom.”
― Leo Tolstoy
115. “Enough or not…it will have to do”
― Leo Tolstoy
116. “Music makes me forget my real situation. It transports me into a state which is not my own. Under the influence of music I really seem to feel what I do not feel, to understand what I do not understand, to have powers which I cannot have. Music seems to me to act like yawning or laughter; I have no desire to sleep, but I yawn when I see others yawn; with no reason to laugh, I laugh when I hear others laugh. And music transports me immediately into the condition of soul in which he who wrote the music found himself at that time.”
― Leo Tolstoy
117. “Historians are like deaf people who go on answering questions that no one has asked them.”
― Leo Tolstoy
118. “I am always with myself, and it is I who am my tormentor.”
― Leo Tolstoy
119. “In the best, the friendliest and simplest relations flattery or praise is necessary, just as grease is necessary to keep wheels turning. ”
― Leo Tolstoy
120. “And not only the pride of intellect, but the stupidity of intellect. And, above all, the dishonesty, yes, the dishonesty of intellect. Yes, indeed, the dishonesty and trickery of intellect.”
― Leo Tolstoy
121. “There is something in the human spirit that will survive and prevail, there is a tiny and brilliant light burning in the heart of man that will not go out no matter how dark the world becomes.”
― Leo Tolstoy
122. “Anna spoke not only naturally and intelligently, but intelligently and casually, without attaching any value to her own thoughts, yet giving great value to the thoughts of the one she was talking to.”
― Leo Tolstoy
123. “You say: I am not free. But I have raised and lowered my arm. Everyone understands that this illogical answer is an irrefutable proof of freedom.”
― Leo Tolstoy
124. “What is the cause of historical events? Power. What is power? Power is the sum total of wills transferred to one person. On what condition are the willso fo the masses transferred to one person? On condition that the person express the will of the whole people. That is, power is power. That is, power is a word the meaning of which we do not understand. ”
― Leo Tolstoy
125. “All that day she had had the feeling that she was playing in the theatre with actors better than herself and that her poor playing spoiled the whole thing.”
― Leo Tolstoy
126. “everything comes in time to him who knows how to wait . . . there is nothing stronger than these two: patience and time, they will do it all.”
― Leo Tolstoy
127. “Happy families are all alike; every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way.”
― Leo Tolstoy
128. “Remember that there is only one important time and it is Now. The present moment is the only time over which we have dominion. The most important person is always the person with whom you are, who is right before you, for who knows if you will have dealings with any other person in the future? The most important pursuit is making that person, the one standing at your side, happy, for that alone is the pursuit of life.”
― Leo Tolstoy
129. “Writing laws is easy, but governing is difficult.”
― Leo Tolstoy
130. “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
131. “It is amazing how complete is the delusion that beauty is goodness. A handsome woman talks nonsense, you listen and hear not nonsense but cleverness. She says and does horrid things, and you see only charm. And if a handsome woman does not say stupid or horrid things, you at once persuade yourself that she is wonderfully clever and moral.”
― Leo Tolstoy
132. “To educate the peasantry, three things are needed: schools, schools and schools.”
― Leo Tolstoy
133.“There will be today, there will be tomorrow, there will be always, and there was yesterday, and there was the day before…”
― Leo Tolstoy
134. “Friends we shall never be, you know that yourself. Whether we shall be the happiest or the wretchedest of people–that’s in your hands.”
― Leo Tolstoy
135.“Ivan Ilych’s life had been most simple and most ordinary and therefore most terrible.”
― Leo Tolstoy
136. “But one thing I beg of you, look on me as your friend; and if you want some help, advice, or simply want to open your heart to someone- not now, but when things are clearer in your heart- think of me.’ He took her hand and kissed it. ‘I shall be happy, if I am able…’ Pierre was confused.
‘Don’t speak to me like that; I’m not worth it!’ cried Natasha…
‘Hush, hush your whole life lies before you,’ he said to her.
‘Before me! No! All is over for me,’ she said, with shame and humiliation.
‘All over?’ he repeated. ‘If I were not myself, but the handsomest, cleverest, best man in the world, and if I were free I would be on my knees this minute to beg for your hand and your love.”
― Leo Tolstoy
137. “We love people not so much for the good they’ve done us, as for the good we’ve done them.”
― Leo Tolstoy
138. “And those who only know the non-platonic love have no need to talk of tragedy. In such love there can be no sort of tragedy.”
― Leo Tolstoy
139. “she smiled at him, and at her own fears.”
― Leo Tolstoy
140. “In place of death there was light.”
― Leo Tolstoy
141. “In infinite time, in infinite matter, in infinite space, is formed a bubble organism, and that bubble lasts a while and bursts, and that bubble is Me.”
― Leo Tolstoy
142. “One of the commonest and most generally accepted delusions is that every man can be qualified in some particular way — said to be kind, wicked, stupid, energetic, apathetic, and so on. People are not like that. We may say of a man that he is more often kind than cruel, more often wise than stupid, more often energetic than apathetic or vice versa; but it could never be true to say of one man that he is kind or wise, and of another that he is wicked or stupid. Yet we are always classifying mankind in this way. And it is wrong. Human beings are like rivers; the water is one and the same in all of them but every river is narrow in some places, flows swifter in others; here it is broad, there still, or clear, or cold, or muddy or warm. It is the same with men. Every man bears within him the germs of every human quality, and now manifests one, now another, and frequently is quite unlike himself, while still remaining the same man.”
― Leo Tolstoy
143. “The business of art lies just in this, — to make that understood and felt which, in the form of an argument, might be incomprehensible and inaccessible.”
― Leo Tolstoy
144. “My life came to a standstill. I could breathe, eat, drink and sleep, and I could not help doing these things; but there was no life, for there were no wishes the fulfilment of which I could consider reasonable. If I desired anything, I knew in advance that whether I satisfied my desire or not, nothing would come of it. Had a fairy come and offered to fulfil my desires I should not have known what to ask. If in moments of intoxication I felt something which, though not a wish, was a habit left by former wishes, in sober moments I knew this to be a delusion and that there was really nothing to wish for. I could not even wish to know the truth, for I guess of what it consisted. The truth was that life is meaningless.”
― Leo Tolstoy
145. “Just as a painter needs light in order to put the finishing touches to his picture, so I need an inner light, which I feel I never have enough of in the autumn.”
― Leo Tolstoy
146. “The pleasure lies not in discovering truth, but in searching for it.”
― Leo Tolstoy
147. “Remember then: there is only one time that is important– Now! It is the most important time because it is the only time when we have any power. The most necessary man is he with whom you are, for no man knows whether he will ever have dealings with any one else: and the most important affair is, to do him good, because for that purpose alone was man sent into this life!”
― Leo Tolstoy
148. “I have lived through much, and now I think I have found what is needed for happiness. A quiet secluded life in the country, with the possibility of being useful to people to whom it is easy to do good, and who are not accustomed to have it done to them; then work which one hopes may be of some use; then rest, nature, books , music, love for one’s neighbor – such is my idea of happiness. And then, on top of all that, you for a mate, and children, perhaps – what more can the heart of a man desire?”
― Leo Tolstoy
149. It is heavenly, when I overcome
My earthly desires
But nevertheless, when I’m not successful,
It can also be quite pleasurable.”
― Leo Tolstoy
150. “I ask one thing: I ask the right to hope and suffer as I do now.”
Vronsky”
― Leo Tolstoy
151. “If goodness has causes, it is not goodness; if it has effects, a reward, it is not goodness either. So goodness is outside the chain of cause and effect.”
― Leo Tolstoy
152. “Every man and every living creature has a sacred right to the gladness of springtime.”
― Leo Tolstoy
153. “Life is everything. Life is God. Everything shifts and moves, and this movement is God. And while there is life, there is delight in the self-awareness of the divinity. To love life is to love God. The hardest and most blissful thing is to love this life in one’s suffering, in the guiltlessness of suffering.”
― Leo Tolstoy
154. “Energy rests upon love; and come as it will, there’s no forcing it.”
― Leo Tolstoy
155. “Am I mad, to see what others do not see, or are they mad who are responsible for all that I am seeing?”
― Leo Tolstoy
156. “He liked fishing and seemed to take pride in being able to like such a stupid occupation.”
― Leo Tolstoy
157. “Tout comprendre, c’est tout pardonner.”
― Leo Tolstoy
158. “Life is too long to say anything definitely; always say perhaps.”
― Leo Tolstoy
159. “When one’s head is gone one doesn’t weep over one’s hair!”
― Leo Tolstoy
160. “The example of a syllogism that he had studied in Kiesewetter’s logic: Caius is a man, men are mortal, therefore Caius is mortal, had throughout his whole life seemed to him right only in relation to Caius, but not to him at all.”
― Leo Tolstoy
161. “A battle is won by him who is firmly resolved to win it.”
― Leo Tolstoy
162. “Teach French and unteach sincerity.”
― Leo Tolstoy
163. “Why does an apple fall when it is ripe? Is it brought down by the force of gravity? Is it because its stalk withers? Because it is dried by the sun, because it grows too heavy, or because the boy standing under the tree wants to eat it? None of these is the cause…. Every action of theirs, that seems to them an act of their own freewill is in the historical sense not free at all but is bound up with the whole course of history and preordained from all eternity.”
― Leo Tolstoy
164. “I want movement, not a calm course of existence. I want excitement and danger and the chance to sacrifice myself for my love. I feel in myself a superabundance of energy which finds no outlet in our quiet life.”
― Leo Tolstoy
165. “the very fact of the death of someone close to them aroused in all who heard about it, as always, a feeling of delight that he had died and they hadn’t.”
― Leo Tolstoy
166. “One can no more approach people without love than one can approach bees without care. Such is the quality of bees…”
― Leo Tolstoy
167. “-Why are you so sad?
– Because you speak to me in words and I look at you with feelings.”
― Leo Tolstoy
168. “In captivity, in the shed, Pierre had learned, not with his mind, but with his whole being, his life, that man is created for happiness, that happiness is within him, in the satisfying of natural human needs, and that all unhappiness comes not from lack, but from superfluity; but now, in these last three weeks of the march, he had learned a new and more comforting truth – he had learned that there is nothing frightening in the world. He had learned that, as there is no situation in the world in which a man can be happy and perfectly free, so there is no situation in which he can be perfectly unhappy and unfree. He had learned that there is a limit to suffering and a limit to freedom, and that those limits are very close; that the man who suffers because one leaf is askew in his bed of roses, suffers as much as he now suffered falling asleep on the bare, damp ground, one side getting cold as the other warmed up; that when he used to put on his tight ballroom shoes, he suffered just as much as now, when he walked quite barefoot (his shoes had long since worn out) and his feet were covered with sores.”
― Leo Tolstoy
169. “the same question arose in every soul: “For what, for whom, must I kill and be killed?”… p982”
― Leo Tolstoy
170. “He did what heroes do after their work is accomplished; he died.”
― Leo Tolstoy
171. “There it is!’ he thought with rapture. ‘When I was already in despair, and when it seemed there would be no end- there it is! She loves me. She’s confessed it.”
― Leo Tolstoy
172. “There was no answer, except the general answer life gives to all the most complex and insoluble questions. That answer is: one must live for the needs of the day, in other words, become oblivious.”
― Leo Tolstoy
