Quotes from Leo Tolstoy

Every kind thing is a virtue. To give water to a thirsty person, or to pick up a stone from a road, or to convince your neighbors and friends that they should be virtuous, or to show a traveler his way, or to smile looking into your neighbor's face—all this is virtue. —MOHAMMED

Three days after

if you don't strain the strings, and then try to break them, you'll find it a difficult job; but strain a string to its very utmost, and the mere weight of one finger on the strained string will snap it.

Benefit performances, bad paintings and statues, philanthropic societies, Gypsies, schools, subscription dinners, carousing, the Masons, churches, books—no one and nothing met with refusal,

He soon felt that the realization of his desires gave him no more than a grain of sand out of the mountain of happiness he had expected.

To educate the people three things are needed: schools, and schools, and schools.

If the English have enslaved the people of India it is just because the latter recognized, and still recognize, force as the fundamental principle of the social order. In accord with that principle they submitted to their little rajahs, and on their behalf struggled against one another, fought the Europeans, the English, and are now trying to fight with them again.

How is it I haven't seen this lofty sky before? And how happy I am that I've finally come to know it. Yes! everything is empty, everything is a deception, except this infinite sky. There is nothing, nothing except that. But there is not even that, there is nothing except silence, tranquillity. And thank God! …

Remember then: there is only one time that is important - Now! It is the most important time because it is the only time when we have any real power.

Moscow was burned by its citizens -- that is true; not, however by the citizens who remained, but by those that went away.

Descendió pues, al hielo, evitando mirar hacia ella como hacia el sol; pero, lo mismo que al sol, no tenía necesidad de mirarla para verla.

All that spring he was not himself and lived through terrible moments. "Without knowing what I am and why I'm here, it is impossible for me to live. And I cannot know that, therefore I cannot live," Levin would say to himself.

I have often remarked that it is hardest of all to live with people who are untruthful and insincere. I can endure anything except that.

Perhaps because I rejoice in what I have, and don't fret for what I haven't,

Con los ojos fijos en Napoleón pensaba en la insignificancia de la grandeza, en la insignificancia de la vida cuyo objeto nadie comprendía, en la insignificancia mayor aún de la muerte cuyo sentido permanecía oculto e impenetrable a los humanos

It was impossible not to hate such pathetically ugly people... It was so clear to Anna that no one had anything to be glad about, that this laughter irritated her painfully, and she would have liked to stop her ears so as not to hear it.

Submission to the law created by men makes one a slave; obedience to the law created by God makes one free.

But instead of all that, here he was—the rich husband of an unfaithful wife, a retired gentleman-in-waiting, who liked to eat, drink, and, unbuttoning himself, to denounce the government a little, a member of the Moscow English Club, and a universally beloved member of Moscow society.

But I'm married, and believe me, in getting to know thoroughly one's wife, if one loves her, as someone has said, one gets to know all women better than if one knew thousands of them.

If there is a God and future life, there is truth and good, and man's highest happiness consists in striving to attain them. We must live, we must love, and we must believe that we live not only today on this scrap of earth, but have lived and shall live forever, there, in the Whole,

He thought of the meetings of a committee of which Berg was a member. He remembered how carefully and at what length everything relating to form and procedure was discussed at those meetings, and how sedulously and promptly all that related to the gist of the business was evaded.

One man may not kill. If he kills a fellow-creature, he is a murderer. If two, ten, a hundred men do so, they, too, are murderers. But a government or a nation may kill as many men as it chooses, and that will not be murder, but a great and noble action.

There is never any 'impossible' with him. That's a thing I hate! Everything is possible.

A king is history's slave.