Quotes from Leo Tolstoy

Well, what should I have done? Counted every tree?" "Of course, they must be counted. You didn't count them, but Ryabinin did. Ryabinin's children will have means of livelihood and education, while yours maybe will not!

There are two sides to the life of every man: there is his individual existence which is free in proportion as his interests are abstract; and his elemental life as a unit in the human swarm, in which he must inevitably obey the laws laid down for him.

I only know this, that she thanks God for all her tribulations, and, above all, because her husband is dead.

I've never seen exquisite fallen beings, and I never shall see them, but such creatures as that painted Frenchwoman at the counter with the ringlets are vermin to my mind, and all fallen women are the same.' 'But the Magdalen?' 'Ah, drop that! Christ would never have said those words if He had known how they would be abused. Of all the Gospel those words are the only ones remembered.

With friends, one is well; but at home, one is better,

every time there have been conquests there have been conquerors; every time there has been a revolution in any state there have been great men," says history. And, indeed, human reason replies: every time conquerors appear there have been wars, but this does not prove that the conquerors caused the wars and that it is possible to find the laws of a war in the personal activity of a single man.

Now she knew all of them as people know one another in a country town; she knew their habits and weaknesses, and where the shoe pinched each one of them.

A cigar is a sort of thing, not exactly a pleasure, but the crown and outward sign of pleasure. Come, this is life! How splendid it is! This is how I should like to live!

We destroy only because we're spiritually sated. Exactly like children!

Anna Arkadyevna read and understood, but it was distasteful to her to read, that is, to follow the reflection of other people's lives. She had too great a desire to live herself.

He suffered from an unlucky faculty—common to many men, especially Russians—the faculty of seeing and believing in the possibility of good and truth, and at the same time seeing too clearly the evil and falsity of life to be capable of taking a serious part in it.

These stupid chignons! There's no getting at the real daughter. One simply strokes the bristles of dead women.

Without knowing what I am and why I am here, life is impossible.

That only shows you have no heart," she said. But her eyes said that she knew he had a heart, and that was why she was afraid of him.

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.

These fits of jealousy, which of late had been more and more frequent, horrified him and, however much he tried to disguise the fact, estranged him from her, although he knew the cause of her jealousy was her love for him. How often he had told himself that to be loved by her was happiness; and now that she loved him only as a woman can for whom love outweighs all that is good in life, he was much farther from happiness than when he had followed her from Moscow.

I often think with regret of that fresh, beautiful feeling of boundless, disinterested love which came to an end without having ever found self-expression or return. It is strange how, when a child, I always longed to be like grown-up people, and yet how I have often longed, since childhood's days, for those days to come back to me!

You can't understand it; for you men, who are free and make your own choice, it's always clear whom you love. But a girl's in a position of suspense, with all a woman's or maiden's modesty, a girl who sees you men from afar, who takes everything on trust,— a girl may have, and often has, such a feeling that she cannot tell what to say.

Man lives consciously for himself but unconsciously he serves as an instrument for the accomplishment of historical and social ends.

What are these deaths and revivals? It is clear that I do not live whenever I lose my faith in the existence of God, and I would have killed myself long ago if I did not have some vague hope of finding God. I truly live only whenever I am conscious of him and seek him. "What, then, do I seek?" a voice cried out within me. "He is there, the one without whom there could be no life." To know God and to liVe come to one and the same thing. God is life.

There were no other eyes like those in the world. There was only one creature in the world that could concentrate for him all the brightness and meaning of life. It was she. It was Kitty.

Tout était si beau, joyeux et pur dans la maison ; mais dans son âme tout était laid, sale, horrible.

Therefore, all these causes-billions of causes-coincided so as to bring about what happened. And consequently none of them was the exclusive cause of the event, but the event had to take place simply because it had to take place.

Next day at the review the Tsar asked Prince Andrey where he desired to serve; and Bolkonsky ruined his chances for ever in the court world by asking to be sent to the front, instead of begging for a post in attendance on the Tsar's person.