Quotes from Leo Tolstoy

Can this be death?' Prince Andrei wondered, casting a fleeting glance of quite unwonted envy at the grass, the wormwood and the thread of smoke that curled upward from the whistling black ball. 'I can't die, I don't want to die. I love life – I love this grass, this earth, this air.…' These were the thoughts in his mind, and at the same time he remembered that people were looking at him.

In precisely the same way the specialty of government is not to obey, but to enforce obedience. And a government is only a government so long as it can make itself obeyed, and therefore it always strives for that and will never willingly abandon its power.

If there were no suffering, man would not know his limitations, would not know himself.

At the men's end of the table the talk grew more and more animated. The colonel told them that the declaration of war had already appeared in Petersburg and that a copy, which he had himself seen, had that day been forwarded by courier to the commander in chief.

Only the vicissitudes of life can show us its vanity and develop our innate love of death or of rebirth to a new life.

Se detuvo y contempló las copas de los álamos, mecidas por el viento,con sus hojas mojadas y relucientes bajo el sol frío, y comprendió que no la perdonarían, que todo el mundo sería inmisericorde con ella,como ese cielo y ese follaje.

And the main thing is," he continued, "that I know, and know for certain, that the enjoyment of doing this good is the only sure happiness in life.

One need only admit that public tranquillity is in danger and any action finds a justification.

When did anybody ever sell anything without being told immediately after the sale, 'It was worth much more'? But when one wants to sell, no one will give anything….

One need only to admit that public tranquillity is in danger and any action finds a justification. All the horrors of the reign of terror were based only on solicitude for public tranquillity.

The men of this party had both the quality and the defect of frankness in their opinions.

As always happens when women lead lonely lives for any length of time without male society, on Anatole's appearance all the three women of Prince Bolkonsky's household felt that their life had not been real till then. Their powers of reasoning, feeling, and observing, immediately increased tenfold, and their life, which seemed to have been passed in darkness, was suddenly lit up by a new brightness full of significance.

Stepan Arkadyevitch's eyes twinkled gaily, and he pondered with a smile.

I would not take a young man to a lock-hospital to knock the hankering after women out of him, but into my soul to see the devils that were rending it.

Where the legs have gone the hind legs must follow

For a long time afterwards, in prison, when moral change took place in me, I thought of that moment, recalled what I could of it, and considered it. I remembered for an instant, before the action I had a terrible consciousness I was killing a defenseless woman, my wife!

What better time is there in our lives than when the two best of virtues-innocent gaiety and a boundless yearning for affection-are our sole objects of pursuit?

Only by renouncing our claim to discern a purpose immediately intelligible to us, and admitting the ultimate purpose to be beyond our ken, may we discern the sequence of experiences in the lives of historic characters, and perceive the cause of the effect they produce (incommensurable with ordinary human capabilities) and then the words chance and genius become superfluous.

They meet, as we shall meet tomorrow, to murder one another; they kill and maim tens of thousands, and then have thanksgiving services for having killed so many people (they even exaggerate the number), and they announce a victory, supposing that the more people they have killed the greater their achievement. How does God above look at them and hear them?' exclaimed Prince Andrei in a shrill, piercing voice.

i wanted movement and not a calm course of existence. i wanted excitement and danger and the chance to sacrifice myself for my love. i felt in myself a superabundance of energy which found no outlet in our quiet life. i suffered most from the feeling that custom was daily petrifying our lives into one fixed shape, that our minds were losing their freedom and becoming enslaved to the steady passionless course of time.

As often happens with passionate people, he was mastered by anger but was still seeking an object on which to vent it.

All the variety, all the charm, all the beauty of life is made up of light and shadow." Levin

People jump back and forth in pursuit of pleasures only because they see the emptiness of their lives more clearly than they do the emptiness of whichever new entertainment attracts them. —BLAISE PASCAL

the chief if not the sole cause of the enslavement of the Indian peoples by the English lies in this very absence of a religious consciousness and of the guidance for conduct which should flow from it