Quotes from Leo Tolstoy

Her motherly instinct told her that there was too much of something in Natasha, and that it would prevent her from being happy.

A real truth, a real faith, needs neither worldly support nor an outer glamour, nor does it need to be forcefully introduced to others. God has time; for Him thousands of years pass as one. Those who feel the need to spread their faith through violence and force either lack faith in God, or in themselves. September

There never has been and cannot be a good life without self-control. Apart from self-control no good life is imaginable.

There is nothing certain, nothing at all except the unimportance of everything I understand, and the greatness of something incomprehensible but all-important.

There are no conditions to which a man cannot become used, especially if he sees that all around him are living in the same way.

And Anatole, with the partiality dull-witted people have for any conclusion they have reached by their own reasoning, repeated the argument he had already put to Dolokhov a hundred times.

There can be no peace for us, only misery, and the greatest happiness

But all these hints at foreseeing what actually did happen on the French as well as on the Russian side are only conspicuous now because the event has justified them. If the event had not come to pass, these hints would have been forgotten, as thousands and millions of suggestions and supposition are now forgotten that were current at the period, but have been shown by time to be unfounded and so have been consigned to oblivion.

But I am alive still. Now what's to be done? what's to be done?

Pay bad people with your goodness; fight their hatred with your kindness. Even if you do not achieve victory over other people, you will conquer yourself. —HENRI AMIEL

It was better not to remember such terrible details.

Pierre's madness simply meant that he didn't wait, as in days gone by, for people to show personal qualities, what he might call virtues, before loving them. With his heart overflowing with love he loved people for no reason at all, and then had no trouble discovering many a sound reason that made them worth loving.

And just as the hungry stomach eagerly accepts every object it can get, hoping to find nourishment in it, Vronsky quite unconsciously clutched first at politics, then at new books, and then at pictures.

We shall all of us die, so why should I grudge a little trouble?

Let the dead bury their dead, but while one has life one must live and be happy!

In the service, especially in the complicated situation such as this, it is difficult not to say impossible, to follow any one straight path without risking mistakes and without accepting responsibility, but once a path seems to be the right one I must follow it, happen what may.

We are forced to fall back on fatalism as an explanation of irrational events (that is to say, events the reasonableness of which we do not understand). The more we try to explain such events in history reasonably, the more unreasonable and incomprehensible do they become to us.

Do not seek quiet and rest in those earthly realms where delusions and desires are engendered, for if thou dost, thou wilt be dragged through the rough wilderness of life, which is far from Me.

I've got four sons in the army, but I'm not crying about it. It's all in God's hands: you may die in your bed, or God may spare you in battle,

Kitty looked into his face, which was so close to her own, and long afterwards—for several years after—that look, full of love, to which he made no response, cut her to the heart with an agony of shame.

Anna Mikhaylovna was already embracing her and weeping. The countess wept too. They wept because they were friends, and because they were kindhearted, and because they - friends from childhood - had to think about such a base thing as money, and because their youth was over.... But those tears were pleasant to them both.

And in spite of the fact that science, art, and politics had no special interest for him, he firmly held those views on all these subjects which were held by the majority and by his paper, and he only changed them when the majority changed them—or, more strictly speaking, he did not change them, but they imperceptibly changed of themselves within him.

We should always try to find those things which do not separate us from other people but which unite us. To work against each other, to be angry and turn your back on each other, is to work against nature. —MARCUS AURELIUS

nothing has contributed so much to the obscuring of Christian truth in the eyes of the heathen, and has hindered so much the diffusion of Christianity through the world, as the disregard of [non-resistance] by men calling themselves Christians, and the permission of war and violence to Christians.