Quotes from Leo Tolstoy

The only absolute knowledge attainable by man is that life is meaningless.

Kings are the slaves of history.

Which is worse? the wolf who cries before eating the lamb or the wolf who does not.

Instead of going to Paris to attend lectures, go to the public library, and you won't come out for twenty years, if you really wish to learn.

Life did not stop, and one had to live.

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?

Everything depends on upbringing.

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

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.

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

God is the same everywhere.

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.

Here I am alive, and it's not my fault, so I have to try and get by as best I can without hurting anybody until death takes over.

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

My principal sin is doubt. I doubt everything, and am in doubt most of the time.

As long as there are slaughter houses there will always be battlefields.

Morning or night, Friday or Sunday, made no difference, everything was the same: the gnawing, excruciating, incessant pain; that awareness of life irrevocably passing but not yet gone; that dreadful, loathsome death, the only reality, relentlessly closing in on him; and that same endless lie. What did days, weeks, or hours matter?

One must be cunning and wicked in this world.

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. And in spite of this he felt that then, when his love was stronger, he could, if he had greatly wished it, have torn that love out of his heart; but now when as at that moment it seemed to him he felt no love for her, he knew that what bound him to her could not be broken.

The Kingdom of God is Within You,

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

I am always with myself, and it is I who am my tormentor.

Enough or not...it will have to do