Quotes from Leo Tolstoy

The pleasure lies not in discovering truth, but in searching for it.

I ask one thing: I ask the right to hope and suffer as I do now." Vronsky

Himmlisch ist's wenn ich bezwungen Meine irdische Begier; Aber doch wenn's nich gelungen Hatt' ich auch recht huebsch Plaisir! Loosely translated: It is heavenly, when I overcome My earthly desires But nevertheless, when I'm not successful, It can also be quite pleasurable.

Every man and every living creature has a sacred right to the gladness of springtime.

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.

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.

Energy rests upon love; and come as it will, there's no forcing it.

Am I mad, to see what others do not see, or are they mad who are responsible for all that I am seeing?

Life is too long to say anything definitely; always say perhaps.

When one's head is gone one doesn't weep over one's hair!

A battle is won by him who is firmly resolved to win it.

Teach French and unteach sincerity.

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.

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.

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.

One can no more approach people without love than one can approach bees without care. Such is the quality of bees...

Why are you so sad? - Because you speak to me in words and I look at you with feelings.

the same question arose in every soul: "For what, for whom, must I kill and be killed?"... p982

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.

He felt that he was himself and did not wish to be anyone else. He only wished now to be better than he had been formerly

He did what heroes do after their work is accomplished; he died.

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.

There are as many kinds of love, as there are hearts

For a few seconds they looked silently into each other's eyes, and the distant and impossible suddenly became near, possible, and inevitable.