Quotes from Leo Tolstoy

One can live magnificently in this world if one knows how to work and how to love.

I've always loved you, and when you love someone, you love the whole person, as they are, and not as you'd like them to be.

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.

Death is finished, he said to himself. It is no more!

Though the doctors treated him, let his blood, and gave him medications to drink, he nevertheless recovered.

Government is an association of men who do violence to the rest of us.

It's too easy to criticize a man when he's out of favour, and to make him shoulder the blame for everybody else's mistakes.

False. Everything by which you have lived and live now is all a deception, a lie, concealing both life and death from you.

But that had been grief--this was joy. Yet that grief and this joy were alike outside all the ordinary conditions of life; they were loopholes, as it were, in that ordinary life through which there came glimpses of something sublime. And in the contemplation of this sublime something the soul was exalted to inconceivable heights of which it had before had no conception, while reason lagged behind, unable to keep up with it.

For if we allow that human life is always guided by reason, we destroy the premise that life is possible at all.

Always the same. Now a spark of hope flashes up, then a sea of despair rages, and always pain; always pain, always despair, and always the same. When alone he had a dreadful and distressing desire to call someone, but he knew beforehand that with others present it would be still worse.

I don't want to prove anything; I merely want to live, to do no one harm but myself. I have the right to do that, haven't I?

These joys were so trifling as to be as imperceptible as grains of gold among the sand, and in moments of depression she saw nothing but the sand; yet there were brighter moments when she felt nothing but joy, saw nothing but the gold.

If so many men, so many minds, certainly so many hearts, so many kinds of love.

I can't think of you and myself apart. You and I are the same to me

We imagine that when we are thrown out of our usual ruts all is lost, but it is only then that what is new and good begins. While there is life there is happiness. There is much, much before us.

And where love ends, hate begins

Patience is waiting. Not passively waiting. That is laziness. But to keep going when the going is hard and slow - that is patience. The two most powerful warriors are patience and time.

Love hinders death. Love is life. All, everything that I understand, I understand 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." These thoughts seemed to him comforting. But they were only thoughts. Something was lacking in them, they were not clear, they were too one-sidedly personal and brain-spun. And there was the former agitation and obscurity.

What is bad? What is good? What should one love, what hate? Why live, and what am I? What is lie,what is death? What power rules over everything?" he asked himself. And there was no answer to any of these questions except one, which was not logical and was not at all an answer to these questions. This answer was: "You will die--and everything will end. You will die and learn everything--or stop asking.

But every acquisition that is disproportionate to the labor spent on it is dishonest.

But that's the whole aim of civilization: to make everything a source of enjoyment.

In all human sorrow nothing gives comfort but love and faith, and that in the sight of Christ's compassion for us no sorrow is trifling.

Everything ends in death, everything. Death is terrible.