Quotes from Leo Tolstoy

He talked to her as people commonly do talk in society—all sorts of nonsense, but nonsense to which he could not help attaching a special meaning in her case. Although he said nothing to her that he could not have said before everybody, he felt that she was becoming more and more dependent upon him, and the more he felt this, the better he liked it, and the tenderer was his feeling for her.

Levin knew his brother and the workings of his mind: he knew that his scepticism came not because life was easier for him without faith. His religious beliefs had been shaken step by step by the theories of modern science concerning the phenomena of the universe; and so Levin knew that this present return was not a valid, reasoned one but simply a temporary, interested return to faith in a desperate hope of recovery.

Prince Vasili came next. He staggered to the sofa on which Pierre was sitting and dropped onto it, covering his face with his hand. Pierre noticed that he was pale and that his jaw quivered and shook as if in an ague.

As Euripides once said, 'Those whom God wishes to destroy he first drives mad.

I developed a pathological pride and the insane conviction that it was my mission to teach people without knowing what I was teaching them.

find a state in which he felt that though idle he was fulfilling his duty, he would have found one of the conditions of man's primitive blessedness. And such a state of obligatory and irreproachable idleness is the lot of a whole class- the military. The chief attraction of military service has consisted and will consist in this compulsory and irreproachable idleness.

It is beyond the power of the human intellect to encompass all the causes of any phenomenon. But the impulse to search into causes is inherent in man's very nature.

the sun rose brilliant and quickly wore away the thin layer of ice that covered the water, and all the warm air was quivering with the steam that rose up from the quickened earth.

Yet it was a strange thing that, though we sometimes passed whole hours together without speaking when we were alone, the mere presence of a third — sometimes of a taciturn and wholly uninteresting person — sufficed to plunge us into the most varied and engrossing of discussions. The truth was that we knew one another too well, and to know a person either too well or too little acts as a bar to intimacy.

Spring had come. My former depression had completely gone, and was replaced by the dreamy spring melancholy of vague hopes and desires.

a French dexterity combined with Italian acting.

a nap "after dinner was silver — before dinner, golden.")

I hear that you have just killed a bear," said Kitty, vainly trying to put her fork into a recalcitrant mush- room which kept flying about on the plate

He originally

Only one step across that line, which reminds on the boundary that separates living from the dead, and then there's uncertainty, torture and death.

as is the case in our time with the ills of all nations, the reason lies in the lack of a reasonable religious teaching which by explaining the meaning of life would supply a supreme law for the guidance of conduct and would replace the more than dubious precepts of pseudo-religion and pseudo-science with the immoral conclusions deduced from them and commonly called 'civilization'. Your

Italy. 'I must use my freedom while I feel so much strength and youth in me,' he said to himself. 'Pierre was right when he said we must believe in the possibility of happiness in order to be happy, and now I do believe in it. Let the dead bury their dead, but while there is life we must live and be happy!' thought he.

And here we live and know nothing,

I don't want to play at life" I said, "But to live.

Love is God, and to die means that I, a particle of love, shall return to the general and eternal source.

consider me your friend, and if you need help, advice, or simply to pour out your soul to somebody - not know, but when your soul is clear - remember me.

he was as fresh as a big, green, waxy Dutch cucumber.

It's as if I had been going downhill when I thought I was going uphill. That's how it was. In society's opinion I was heading uphill, but in equal measure life was slipping away from me.

Basta que pensemos, queridos hermanos y hermanas, en la vida que llevamos, basta que pensemos que continuamente despertamos la colera de Dios, y hacemos sufrir a su divino Hijo para que comprendamos que no podemos ser perdonados. Una ruina espantosa nos amenaza, sufrimientos eternos nos esperan. ¿Y como salvarnos?... ¿Cómo huir, hermanos, de este incendio terrible? ¡Ah! Ya arde la casa y no hay salida que nos dé paso!