Leo Tolstoy Quotes

Respect was invented to cover the empty place where love should be.. Leo Tolstoy

Respect was invented to cover the empty place where love should be.

I've always loved you, and when you love someone, you love the whole person, just as

I've always loved you, and when you love someone, you love the whole person, just as he or she is, and not as you would like them to be.

They've got no idea what happiness is, they don't know that without this love there is

They've got no idea what happiness is, they don't know that without this love there is no happiness or unhappiness for us-there is no life.

The whole world is divided for me into two parts: one is she, and there is

The whole world is divided for me into two parts: one is she, and there is all happiness, hope, light; the other is where she is not, and there is dejection and darkness...

A quiet secluded life in the country, with the possibility of being useful to people to

A quiet secluded life in the country, with the possibility of being useful to people to whom it is easy to do good, and who are not accustomed to have it done to them; then work which one hopes may be of some use; then rest, nature, books, music, love for one's neighbor - such is my idea of happiness.

Seize the moments of happiness, love and be loved! That is the only reality in the

Seize the moments of happiness, love and be loved! That is the only reality in the world, all else is folly. It is the one thing we are interested in here.

-Why are you so sad? - Because you speak to me in words and I look

-Why are you so sad?
- Because you speak to me in words and I look at you with feelings.

I think... if it is true that there are as many minds as there are heads,

I think... if it is true that
there are as many minds as there
are heads, then there are as many
kinds of love as there are hearts.

Love those you hate you.

You can love a person dear to you with a human love, but an enemy can

You can love a person dear to you with a human love, but an enemy can only be loved with divine love.

In the name of God, stop a moment, cease your work, look around you.. Leo Tolstoy

In the name of God, stop a moment, cease your work, look around you.

Pierre was right when he said that one must believe in the possibility of happiness in

Pierre was right when he said that one must believe in the possibility of happiness in order to be happy, and I now believe in it. Let the dead bury the dead, but while I'm alive, I must live and be happy.

Wrong does not cease to be wrong because the majority share in it.. Leo Tolstoy

Wrong does not cease to be wrong because the majority share in it.

Boredom: the desire for desires.. Leo Tolstoy

Boredom: the desire for desires.

Muhammad has always been standing higher than the Christianity. He does not consider god as a

Muhammad has always been standing higher than the Christianity. He does not consider god as a human being and never makes himself equal to God. Muslims worship nothing except God and Muhammad is his Messenger. There is no any mystery and secret in it.

There is no greatness where there is not simplicity, goodness, and truth.. Leo Tolstoy

There is no greatness where there is not simplicity, goodness, and truth.

Vronsky saw nothing and no one. He felt himself as a king, not because she had

Vronsky saw nothing and no one. He felt himself as a king, not because she had made an impression on Anna-he did not yet believe that-but because the impression she had made on him gave him happiness and pride.

A man's every action is inevitably conditioned by what surrounds him and by his own body..

A man's every action is inevitably conditioned by what surrounds him and by his own body.

I think the motive force of all our action is, after all, personal happiness.. Leo Tolstoy

I think the motive force of all our action is, after all, personal happiness.

Everything was lit up by her. She was the smile that brightened everything around.. Leo Tolstoy

Everything was lit up by her. She was the smile that brightened everything around.

Spiritual activity, education, civilization, culture, the idea are all vague, indefinite concepts, under the banner of which it is quite convenient to use words that have a still less clear meaning and therefore can easily be plugged into any theory.

If so many men, so many minds, certainly so many hearts, so many kinds of love.

But every acquisition that is disproportionate to the labor spent on it is dishonest.

One must be cunning and wicked in this world.

I think that when you remember, remember, remember everything like that, you could go on until you remember what was there before you were in the world.

Are we not all flung into the world for no other purpose than to hate each other, and so to torture ourselves and one another?

If you love me as you say you do,' she whispered, 'make it so that I am at peace.

It's hard to love a woman and do anything.

He felt now that he was not simply close to her, but that he did not know where he ended and she began.

We are asleep until we fall in Love!

I'm like a starving man who has been given food. Maybe he's cold, and his clothes are torn, and he's ashamed, but he's not unhappy.

I wanted movement and not a calm course of existence. I wanted excitement and danger and the chance to sacrifice myself for my love.

He was afraid of defiling the love which filled his soul.

He could not be mistaken. There were no other eyes like those in the world. There was only one creature in the world who could concentrate for him all the brightness and meaning of life. It was she. It was Kitty.

He stepped down, avoiding any long look at her as one avoids long looks at the sun, but seeing her as one sees the sun, without looking.

If, then, I were asked for the most important advice I could give, that which I considered to be the most useful to the men of our century, I should simply say: in the name of God, stop a moment, cease your work, look around you.

If we admit that human life can be ruled by reason, then all possibility of life is destroyed.

And you know, there's less charm in life when you think about death-but it's more peaceful.

There are no conditions to which a person cannot grow accustomed, especially if he sees that everyone around him lives in the same way.

Life did not stop, and one had to live.

Only people who are capable of loving strongly can also suffer great sorrow, but this same necessity of loving serves to counteract their grief and heals them.

If you want to be happy, be.

Man cannot possess anything as long as he fears death. But to him who does not fear it, everything belongs. If there was no suffering, man would not know his limits, would not know himself.

A battle is won by him who is firmly resolved to win it.

To tell the truth is very difficult, and young people are rarely capable of it.

And where love ends, hate begins

Every man had his personal habits, passions, and impulses toward goodness, beauty, and truth.

Loving the same man or woman all your life, why, that's like supposing the same candle could last you all your life

If only [people] understood that every thought is both false and true! False by one-sidenedness resulting from man's inability to embrace the whole truth, and true as an expression of one fact of human endeavor.

No one can attain to truth by himself. Only by laying stone on stone with the cooperation of all, by the millions of generations from our forefather Adam to our own times, is that temple reared which is to be a worthy dwelling place of the Great God.

Este incredibil cât de completă este iluzia care ne face să credem că frumuseţea este în genere bunătate.

Without knowledge of what I am and why I am here, it is impossible to live, and since I cannot know that, I cannot live either. In an infinity of time, in an infinity of matter, and an infinity of space a bubble-organism emerges while will exist for a little time and then burst, and that bubble am I.

One must try to make one's life as pleasant as possible. I'm alive and it's not my fault, which means I must somehow go on living the best I can, without bothering anybody, until I die.'
'But what makes you live? With such thoughts, you'll sit without moving, without undertaking anything...'
'Life won't leave one alone as it is.

It is amazing how complete is the delusion that beauty is goodness.

We can know only that we know nothing. And that is the highest degree of human wisdom.

People of limited intelligence are fond of talking about "these days," imagining that they have discovered and appraised the peculiarities of "these days" and that human nature changes with the times.

truth, like gold, is to be obtained not by its growth, but by washing away from it all that is not gold.

He soon felt that the realization of his desire had given him only a grain of the mountain of happiness he had expected. It showed him the eternal error people make in imagining that happiness is the realization of desires.

Happiness consists in always aspiring perfection, the pause in any level in perfection is the pause of happiness

Then he thought himself unhappy, but happiness was all in the future; now he felt that the best happiness was already in the past.

He had learned that, as there is no situation in the world in which a man can be happy and perfectly free, so there is no situation in which he can be perfectly unhappy and unfree.

Toate familiile fericite se aseamănă între ele. Fiecare familie nefericită este nefericită în felul ei.

If you want to be Happy,BE

Fate acts with reason. And we are always passing judgment; that's not right, and this doesn't suit us. Our happiness, my dear, is like water in a drag-net; you drag, and it is all puffed up, but pull it out and there's nothing.

It's all God's will: you can die in your sleep, and God can spare you in battle.

Everything ends in death, everything. Death is terrible.

In spite of death, he felt the need of life and love. He felt that love saved him from despair, and that this love, under the menace of despair, had become still stronger and purer. The one mystery of death, still unsolved, had scarcely passed before his eyes, when another mystery had arisen, as insoluble, urging him to love and to life.

God forgive me everything!’ she said, feeling the impossibility of struggling...

The more mental effort he made the clearer he saw that it was undoubtedly so: that he had really forgotten and overlooked one little circumstance in life - that Death would come and end everything, so that it was useless to begin anything, and that there was no help for it, Yes it was terrible but true

God is the same everywhere.

He is not apprehended by reason, but by life.

Dumnezeu este doar unul şi acelaşi pretutindeni.

In the midst of winter, I find within me the invisible summer...

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

Without the support from religion-remember, we talked about it-no father, using only his own resources, would be able to bring up a child.

If goodness has causes, it is not goodness; if it has effects, a reward, it is not goodness either. So goodness is outside the chain of cause and effect.

Well, pray if you like, only you'd do better to use your judgment.

To know God and to live is one and the same thing. God is life.

It never before happened that the rich ruling and more educated minority, which has the most influence on the masses, not only disbelieved the existing religion but was convinced that no religion is no longer needed.

I led the life of so many other so-called respectable people, - that is, in debauchery. And like the majority, while leading the life of a debauche, I was convinced that I was a man of irreproachable morality.

In time, things fall its places for a man who know how to wait

In the best, the friendliest and simplest relations flattery or praise is necessary, just as grease is necessary to keep wheels turning.

We walked to meet each other up at the time of our love and then we have been irresistibly drifting in different directions, and there's no altering that.

They ought to find out how to vaccinate for love, like smallpox.

Between Countess Nordston and Levin there had been established those relations, not infrequent in society, in which two persons, while ostensibly remaining on friendly terms, are contemptuous of each other to such a degree that they cannot even treat each other seriously and cannot even insult each one another.

Human science fragments everything in order to understand it, kills everything in order to examine it.

Chance created the situation; genius made use of it.

The strongest of all warriors are these two - Time and Patience.

There lay between them, separating them, that same terrible line of the unknown and of fear, like the line separating the living from the dead.

Let fear once get possession of the soul, and it does not readily yield its place to another sentiment.
Sebastopol by Leo Tolstoy

He was a passionate adherent of the new ideas and of Speransky, and the busiest purveyor of news in Petersburg, one of those men who choose their opinions like their clothes - according to the fashion - but for that very reason seem the most vehement partisans

Rest, nature, books, music…such is my idea of happiness.

Anna read and understood, but it was unpleasant to read, that is to say, to follow the reflection of other people's lives. She was too eager to live herself.

All the diversity, all the charm, and all the beauty of life are made up of light and shade.

But the princess had never seen the beautiful expression of her eyes; the expression that came into them when she was not thinking of herself. As is the case with everyone, her face assumed an affected, unnatural, ugly expression as soon as she looked in the looking glass.

You think that your laws correct evil - they only increase it. There is but one way to end evil - by rendering good for evil to all men without distinction.

As a house can be only be built satisfactorily and durably when there is a foundation, and a picture can be painted only when there is something prepared to paint it on, so carnal love is only legitimate, reasonable, and lasting when it is based on the respect and love of one human being for another.

The sanctification of political power by Christianity is blasphemy; it is the negation of Christianity.

One can no more approach people without love than one can approach bees without care. Such is the quality of bees...

He was in a fairy kingdom where everything was possible.
He looked up at the sky. And the sky was a fairy realm like the earth. It was clearing, and over the tops of the trees clouds were swiftly sailing as if unveiling the stars.

Doctoring her seemed to her as absurd as putting together the pieces of a broken vase. Her heart was broken. Why would they try to cure her with pills and powders?

If everyone fought for their own convictions there would be no war.

He remembered his mother's love for him, and his family's, and his friends', and the enemy's intention to kill him seemed impossible.

What a terrible thing war is, what a terrible thing!

Her maternal instinct told her Natasha had too much of something, and because of this she would not be happy

And once he had seen this, he could never again see it otherwise, just as we cannot reconstruct an illusion once it has been explained.

War is not a polite recreation but the vilest thing in life, and we ought to understand that and not play at war. Our attitude towards the fearful necessity of war ought to be stern. It boils down to this: we should have done with humbug, and let war be war and not a game. Otherwise, war is a favourite pastime of the idle and frivolous...

It was necessary that millions of men in whose hands lay the real power - the soldiers who fired, or transported provisions and guns - should consent to carry out the will of these weak individuals...

Millions of men, renouncing their human feelings and reason, had to go from west to east to slay their fellows, just as some centuries previously hordes of men had come from the east to the west slaying their fellows.

Those are the men,' added Bolkonsky with a sigh which he could not suppress, as they went out of the palace, 'those are the men who decide the fate of nations.

Life meanwhile, the actual life of men with their real interests of health and sickness, labour and rest, with their interests of thought, science, poetry, music, love, affection, hatred, passion, went its way, as always, independently, apart from the political amity or enmity of Napoleon Bonaparte, and apart from all possible reforms.

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.

War is the most painful act of subjection to the laws of God that can be required of the human will.

You consider war to be inevitable? Very good. Let everyone who advocates war be enrolled in a special regiment of advance-guards, for the front of every storm, of every attack, to lead them all!

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.

And so there was no single cause for war, but it happened simply because it had to happen

Send anyone who preaches war to a special frontline legion -into the assault, into the attack, ahead of everyone.

The business of art lies just in this, - to make that understood and felt which, in the form of an argument, might be incomprehensible and inaccessible.

You need feeling, emotion, to create. You can't create out of indifference.

Se toda a vida complexa de muitas pessoas se desenrola inconscientemente, então é como se essa vida não tivesse existido.

A finalidade ds humanos não consiste e cumprir o que eles consideram bem mas em chamar 'meu' ao maior número possível de objectos.

Art is the uniting of the subjective with the objective,
of nature with reason, of the unconscious with the conscious, and
therefore art is the highest means of knowledge.

To evoke in oneself a feeling one has once experienced, and having evoked it in oneself, then by means of movements, lines, colors, sounds, or forms expressed in words, so to transmit that feeling that others may experience the same feeling - this is the activity of art.

Where there has been true science, art has always been its exponent.

This history of culture will explain to us the motives, the conditions of life, and the thought of the writer or reformer.

The subject of history is the life of peoples and mankind.

In historical events great men - so-called - are but labels serving to give a name to the event, and like labels they have the least possible connexion with the event itself.

Only by assuming an infinitesimally small unit for observation - a differential of history (that is, the common tendencies of men) - and arriving at the art of integration (finding the sum of the infinitesimals) can we hope to discover the laws of history.

Every monarch in the world, except the Emperor of China, wears a military uniform, and bestows the greatest rewards on the man who kills the greatest number of his fellow-creatures.

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.

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

Here's my advice to you: don't marry until you can tell yourself that you've done all you could, and until you've stopped loving the women you've chosen, until you see her clearly, otherwise you'll be cruelly and irremediably mistaken. Marry when you're old and good for nothing...Otherwise all that's good and lofty in you will be lost.

Yes, there is something in me hateful, repulsive," thought Ljewin, as he came away from the Schtscherbazkijs', and walked in the direction of his brother's lodgings. "And I don't get on with other people. Pride, they say. No, I have no pride. If I had any pride, I should not have put myself in such a position".

Man survives earthquakes, epidemics, the horrors of disease, and agonies of the soul, but all the time his most tormenting tragedy has been, is, and will always be, the tragedy of the bedroom.

Here it is. Let's say you're married, you love your wife, but you're attracted by another woman.'

'Excuse me, but I absolutely cannot understand how after eating my fill here I could go past a bakery and steal a roll.

Many families remain for years in the same place, though both husband and wife are sick of it, simply because there is neither complete division nor agreement between them.

All the horrors of the reign of terror were based on concern for public tranquility.

Blessed are the peacemakers; theirs is the kingdom of heaven

If everyone fought only for his own convictions, there would be no wars.

All happy families are alike; each unhappy family is unhappy in its own way.

Todas as famílias felizes se parecem, cada família infeliz é infeliz à sua maneira.

In order to understand, observe, deduce, man must first be conscious of himself as alive.

There are such repulsive faces in the world.

We are all brothers, and yet I live by receiving a salary for arraigning, judging and punishing a thief or a prostitute, whose existence is conditioned by the whole consumption of my life.

She was utterly unlike what she had been when he first saw her. Both morally and physically she had changed for the worse. [...] He looked at her as a man looks at a faded flower he has gathered, with difficulty recognizing in it the beauty for which he picked and ruined it.

You say: I am not free. But I have raised and lowered my arm. Everyone understands that this illogical answer is an irrefutable proof of freedom.

Everyone thinks of changing the world, but no one thinks of changing himself.

True life is lived when tiny changes occur.

When loving with human love one may pass from love to hatred, but divine love cannot change.

The antagonism between life and conscience may be removed in two ways: by a change of life or by a change of conscience.

If there was a reason why he preferred the liberal tendency to the conservative one (also held to by many of his circle), it was not because he found the liberal tendency more sensible, but it more closely suited his manner of life.

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.

Hypocrisy in anything whatever may deceive the cleverest and most penetrating man, but the least wide-awake of children recognizes it, and is revolted by it, however ingeniously it may be disguised.

The higher a man stands on the social ladder, the greater the number of people he is connected with, the more power he has over other people, the more obvious is the predestination and inevitability of his every action.

Power is the sum total of the wills of the mass, transfered by express or tactic agreement to rulers chosen by the masses.

Power is a word the meaning of which we do not understand.

Rummaging in our souls, we often dig up something that ought to have lain there unnoticed.

Whatever we may say about the soul going to the sky... we know there is no sky but only an atmosphere.

A writer is dear and necessary for us only in the measure of which he reveals to us the inner workings of his very soul.

He was nine years old; he was a child; he he knew his own soul, it was precious to him, he guarded it as the eyelid guards the eye, and without the key of love he let no one into his soul.

It hurt her to stir up these feelings, but yet she knew that that was the best part of her soul, and that that part of her soul would quickly be smothered in the life she was leading.

Everything I know, I know because of love.

I felt a wish never to leave that room - a wish that dawn might never come, that my present frame of mind might never change.

If a teacher has only love for the cause, it will be a good teacher. If a teacher has only love for student, as a father, mother, he will be better than the teacher, who read all the books, but has no love for the cause, nor to the students. If the teacher combines love to the cause and to his disciples, he is the perfect teacher.

Pure and complete sorrow is as impossible as pure and complete joy.

Pierre had for the first time experienced that strange and fascinating feeling in the Slobodsky palace, when he suddenly felt that wealth and power and life, all that men build up and guard with such effort ,is only worth anything through the joy with which it can all be cast away.

But there was another class of people, the real people. To this class they all belonged, and in it the great thing was to be elegant, generous, plucky, gay, to abandon oneself without a blush to every passion, and to laugh at everything else.

I often think that men don't understand what is noble and what is ignorant, though they always talk about it.

Men never understand what honor is, though they're always talking about it

It was as if the main screw in his head, which held his whole life together, had become stripped. The screw would not go in, would not come out, but turned in the same groove without catching hold, and it was impossible to stop turning it.

Love. The reason I dislike that word is that it means too much for me, far more than you can understand."

- Anna Karenina {Anna Karenina}

The best stories don't come from "good vs. bad" but "good vs. good.

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