Leo Tolstoy Quotes (295 Quotes)

All the girls in the world were divided into two classes: one class included all the girls in the world except her, and they had all the usual human feelings and were very ordinary girls; while the other class -herself alone- had no weaknesses and was superior to all humanity.

Energy rests upon love; and come as it will, there's no forcing it.

He went down trying not to look long at her, as though she were the sun, but he saw her, as one sees the sun, without looking.

In Varenka, she realized that one has but to forget oneself and love others, and one will be calm, happy, and noble.

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

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

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.

Davout looked up and gazed intently at him. For some seconds they looked at one another, and that look saved Pierre. Apart from conditions of war and law, that look established human relations between the two men. At that moment an immense number of things passed dimly through both their minds, and they realized that they were both children of humanity and were brothers.

How can one be well...when one suffers morally?

Kings are the slaves of history.

Pierre was one of those people who are strong only when they feel themselves perfectly pure.

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...

When a man sees a dying animal, horror comes over him: that which he himself is, his essence, is obviously being annihilated before his eyes--is ceasing to be. But when the dying one is a person, and a beloved person, then, besides a sense of horror at the annihilation of life, there is a feeling of severance and a spiritual wound which, like a physical wound, sometimes kills and sometimes heals, but always hurts and fears any external, irritating touch.

And not only the pride of intellect, but the stupidity of intellect. And, above all, the dishonesty, yes, the dishonesty of intellect. Yes, indeed, the dishonesty and trickery of intellect.

Enough or not...it will have to do

I ... having filled my life with the spiritual blessings Christianity gave me, brimful of these blessings and living by them, I, like a child, not understanding them, destroy them -- that is, I wish to destroy that by which I live.

Is it really possible to tell someone else what one feels?

She had no need to ask why he had come. She knew as certainly as if he had told her that he was here to be where she was.

Then we should find some artificial inoculation against love, as with smallpox.

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

Dumnezeu este doar unul s,i acelas,i pretutindeni.

How often we sin, how much we deceive, and all for what?... All will end in death, all!

Lay me down like a stone oh God, and raise me up like a new bread"."

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.

There are such repulsive faces in the world.

When an apple has ripened and falls, why does it fall? Because of its attraction to the earth, because its stalk withers, because it is dried by the sun, because it grows heavier, because the wind shakes it, or because the boy standing below wants to eat it?

And so liberalism had become a habit of Stepan Arkadyevitch's, and he liked his newspaper, as he did his cigar after dinner, for the slight fog it diffused in his brain.

Every man, knowing to the smallest detail all the complexity of the conditions surrounding him, involuntarily assumes that the complexity of these conditions and the difficulty of comprehending them are only his personal, accidental peculiarity, and never thinks that others are surrounded by the same complexity as he is.

I always loved you, and if one loves anyone, one loves the whole person, just as they are and not as one would like them to be. -Dolly

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

She was in that highly-wrought state when the reasoning powers act with great rapidity: the state a man is in before a battle or a struggle, in danger, and at the decisive moments of life - those moments when a man shows once and for all what he is worth, that his past was not lived in vain but was a preparation for these moments.

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

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

Each man lives for himself, uses his freedom to achieve his personal goals, and feels with his whole being that right now he can or cannot do such-and-such an action; but as soon as he does it, this action, committed at a certain moment in time, becomes irreversible, and makes itself the property of history, in which is has not a free but a predestined significance.

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

Life did not stop, and one had to live.

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

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.

When one's head is gone one doesn't weep over one's hair!

And the light by which she had read the book filled with troubles, falsehoods, sorrow, and evil, flared up more brightly than ever before, lighted up for her all that had been in darkness, flickered, began to grow dim, and was quenched forever.

Everything intelligent is so boring.

I ask one thing only: I ask for the right to hope, to suffer as I do. But if even that cannot be, command me to disappear, and I disappear. You shall not see me if my presence is distasteful to you.

It's not so much that he can't fall in love, but he has not the weakness necessary.

Sight-seeing, aside from the fact that everything had been seen already, could not have for him--and intelligent Russian--the inexplicable importance attached to it by the English.

There are people who, on meeting a successful rival, no matter in what, are at once disposed to turn their backs on everything good in him, and to see only what is bad. There are people, on the other hand, who desire above all to find in that lucky rival the qualities by which he has outstripped them, and seek with a throbbing ache at heart only what is good.

All the stories and descriptions of that time without exception peak only of the patriotism, self-sacrifice, despair, grief, and heroism of the Russians. But in reality it was not like that...The majority of the people paid no attention to the general course of events but were influenced only by their immediate personal interests.

Every general and every soldier was conscious of his own insignificance, aware of being but a drop in that ocean of men, and yet at the same time was conscious of his strength as a part of that enormous whole.

I don't give a damn unless I'm fond of a person;but I'd sacrifice my life for those I am fond of; the rest I'd throttle if they stood in my way...And you may not believe me but if I still set a value on life it is only because I still hope one day to meet such a heavenly creature who will regenarate me, purify me and elevate me. But you don't understand that.

Life is everything. Life is God. Everything shifts and moves, and this movement is God. And while there is life, there is delight in the self-awareness of the divinity. To love life is to love God. The hardest and most blissful thing is to love this life in one's suffering, in the guiltlessness of suffering.

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