Quotes from Leo Tolstoy

No one is satisfied with his fortune,and everyone is satisfied with his wit.

Here I am...wanting to accomplish something and completely forgetting it must all end--that there is such a thing as death.

In order to carry through any undertaking in family life, there must necessarily be either complete division between the husband and wife, or loving agreement. When the relations of a couple are vacillating and neither one thing nor the other, no sort of enterprise can be undertake. 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.

The more is given the less the people will work for themselves, and the less they work the more their poverty will increase.

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

It is not enough to be a hardworking person. Think: what do you work at?

To say that a work of art is good, but incomprehensible to the majority of men, is the same as saying of some kind of food that it is very good but that most people can't eat it.

If a man does not work at necessary and good things, then he will work at unnecessary and stupid things

All, everything that I understand, I only understand because I love."

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.

He felt like a man who, after straining his eyes to peer into the remote distance, finds what he was seeking at his very feet. All his life he had been looking over the heads of those around him, while he had only to look before him without straining his eyes. p 1320

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

And the candle by the light of which she had been reading that book filled with anxieties, deceptions, grief and evil, flared up brighter than ever, lit up for her all that had once been darkness, sputtered, grew dim and went out for ever.

Nothing has been discovered, nothing has been invented. We can only know that we know nothing. And that's the highest degree of human wisdom.

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

for nightinggales - we know - can't live on fairytales.

either you are so underdeveloped that you can't see all that you can do, or you won't sacrifice your ease, your vanity, or whatever it is, to do it...

Nowadays, as before, the public declaration and confession of Orthodoxy is usually encountered among dull-witted, cruel and immoral people who tend to consider themselves very important. Whereas intelligence, honesty, straightforwardness, good-naturedness and morality are qualities usually found among people who claim to be non-believers.

How strange it was to think that he, who such a short time ago dared not believe in the happiness of her loving him, now felt unhappy because she loved him too much!

but that what was for him the greatest and most cruel injustice appeared to others a quite ordinary occurrence.

Why nowadays there's a new fashion every day.

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

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

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