Quotes from Leo Tolstoy

Art begins when a man, with a purpose of communicating to other people a feeling he once experienced, calls it up again within himself and expresses it by certain external signs.

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

I don't think badly of people. I like everybody, and I'm sorry for everybody.

excuse me' he added, taking the opera glasses out of her hands and looking over her bare shoulder at the row of boxes opposite, 'i'm afraid i'm becoming ridiculous

There is no greatness where simplicity, goodness and truth are absent

Speech is silver but silence is golden.

I'm getting old, that's the thing! What's in me now won't be there anymore.

Everything was made bright by her. She was the smile that shed light all around her.

There is one thing, and only one thing, in which it is granted to you to be free in life, all else being beyond your power: that is to recognize and profess the truth.

There was no solution, save that universal solution which life gives to all questions, even the most complex and insolvable: One must live in the needs of the day--that is, forget oneself.

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.

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.

It will pass, it will all pass, we're going to be so happy! If our love could grow any stronger it would grow stronger because there is something horrifying in it,

I often think how unfairly life's good fortune is sometimes distributed.

There are such repulsive faces in the world.

She put both her hands on his shoulders and gazed at him long, with a deep look of ecstasy and yet searchingly. She scrutinized his face to make up for the time she had not seen him. She compared, as she did at every interview with him, the image her fancy painted of him (incomparably finer than, and impossible in actual existence) with his real self

For man to be able to live he must either not see the infinite, or have such an explanation of the meaning of life as will connect the finite with the infinite.

Always the same. Now a spark of hope flashes up, then a sea of despair rages, and always pain; always pain, always despair, and always the same.

Art is not a handicraft; it is the transmission of feeling the artist has experienced.

These loaves, pigeons, and two little boys seemed unearthly. It all happened at the same time: a little boy ran over to a pigeon, glancing over at Levin with a smile; the pigeon flapped its wings and fluttered, gleaming in the sunshine among the snowdust quivering in the air, while the smell of freshly baked bread was wafted out of a little window as the loaves were put out. All this together was so extraordinarily wonderful that Levin burst out laughing and crying for joy.

And all people live, not by reason of any care they have for themselves, but by the love for them that is in other people.

Man lives consciously for himself, but serves as an unconscious instrument for the achievement of historical, universally human goals.

Count Vronsky: I love you! Anna Karenina: Why? Count Vronsky: You can't ask Why about love!

There is something so enchanting in the smile of melancholy. It is a ray of light in the darkness, a shade between sadness and despair, showing the possibility of consolation.