Quotes from Leo Tolstoy

In the love between a man and a woman there always comes a moment when this love has reached its zenith—a moment when it is unconscious, unreasoning, and with nothing sensual about it.

At first, in the bustle of building and settling down, Pahom was pleased with it all, but when he got used to it he began to think that even here he had not enough land.

One can't cure anything. Our body is a machine for living. It is organized for that, it is its nature. Let life go on in it unhindered and let it defend itself, it will do more than if you paralyze it by encumbering it with remedies.

on which side is truth,—on the side of the thoughts which seem true and well-founded, or on the side of the lives of others and myself?

And even now I experience that blessed feeling. To love one's neighbors, to love one's enemies. Always to love--to love God in all His Manifestations. To love one's friends is human love, but to love one's enemies is divine.

You have a wholesome character, and you want all of life to made up of wholesome phenomena, but that doesn't happen... All the variety, all the charm, all the beauty of life are made up of light and shade.

The starting point of it all was, of course, moral perfection, but this was soon replaced by a belief in overall perfection, that is, a desire to be better not in my own eyes or in the eyes of God, but rather a desire to be better in the eyes of other people. And this effort to be better in the eyes of other people was very quickly displaced by a longing to be stronger than other people, that is, more renowned, more important, wealthier than others.

knew that the result of a battle is decided not by the orders of a commander in chief, nor the place where the troops are stationed, nor by the number of cannon or of slaughtered men, but by that intangible force called the spirit of the army, and he watched this force and guided it in as far as that was in his power.

This is tantamount to saying, "My hand is weak. I cannot draw a straight line,—that is, a line which will be the shortest line between two given points,—and so, in order to make it more easy for myself, I, intending to draw a straight, will choose for my model a crooked line." The weaker my hand, the greater the need that my model should be perfect.

The presence of the problem of man's free will, though unexpressed, is felt at every step of history. All seriously thinking historians have involuntarily encountered this question. All the contradictions and obscurities of history and the false path historical science has followed are due solely to the lack of a solution of that question. If the will of every man were free, that is, if each man could act as he pleased, all history would be a series of disconnected incidents.

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.

So much the worse for you!" he said mentally, like a man who, after vainly attempting to extinguish a fire, should fly in a rage with his vain efforts and say, "Oh, very well then! you shall burn for this!

M? ?????? ????????? ?????? ??? ?? ??????? ????. ?????? ????!

He felt for the first moment as a man feels when, having suddenly received a violent blow from behind, he turns round, angry and eager to avenge himself, to look for his antagonist, and finds that it is he himself who has accidentally struck himself, that there is no one to be angry with, and that he must put up with and try to soothe the pain.

En que estaba pensando? Si, en mi vida; como sea que me la represente no puede ser sino dolor. Todos estamos llamados a sufrir, lo sabemos y queremos disimularlo de alguna manera. Pero cuando nos clava sus ojos la verdad, ¿Que nos queda por hacer?

She felt for him with her whole heart, the more because she was pitying him for suffering from the pain she had caused.

hydra of revolution,

suffering and freedom have their limits...those limits are very near together.

And in imagination he began to recall the best moments of his pleasant life. But strange to say none of those best moments of his pleasant life now seemed at all what they had then seemed – none of them except the first recollections of childhood. There, in childhood, there had been something really pleasant with which it would be possible to live if it could return. But the child who had experienced that happiness existed no longer, it was like a reminiscence of somebody else.

The main thing he wanted to weep about was a sudden, vivid awareness of the terrible opposition between something infinitely great and indefinable that was in him, and something narrow and fleshy that he himself, and even she, was. This opposition tormented him and gladdened him while she sang.

the irrepressible, quivering brilliance of her eyes and her smile set him on fire

And suddenly both of them felt that though they were friends, though they had been dining and drinking together, which should have drawn them closer, yet each was thinking only of his own affairs, and they had nothing to do with one another.

Loose an hour and you cannot catch up in a year.

But she immediately turned away to Princess Marya Borisovna and never once glanced at him until he got up to leave; then she looked at him, but obviously only because it was impolite not to look at a man when he was bowing to you.