Quotes from Leo Tolstoy

A cigar is a sort of thing, not exactly a pleasure, but the crown and outward sign of pleasure.

It's wrong, what you say, and I beg you, if you're a good man, to forget what you've said, as I forget it," she said at last. "Not one word, not one gesture of yours shall I, could I, ever forget...

There is nothing, nothing certain but the nothingness of all that is comprehensible to us, and the grandeur of something incomprehensible, but more important!

We are forced to fall back on fatalism as an explanation of irrational events (that is to say, events the reasonableness of which we do not understand).

All these institutions [prisons] seemed purposely invented for the production of depravity and vice, condensed to such a degree that no other conditions could produce it, and for the spreading of this condensed depravity and vice broadcast among the whole population.

The question of how things will settle down is the only important question...

It would be a sin to help you destroy yourself.

Where love is, there God is also.

I killed the wife when I first tasted sensual joys without love, and then it was that I killed my wife.

The further one goes, the better the land seems.

If a man decides that it is better for him to resist the demands of a present feeble love, in the name of another, of a future manifestation, he deceives either himself or other people, and loves no one but himself. Future love does not exist. Love is a present activity only. The man who does not manifest love in the present has not love.

The combination of causes of phenomena is beyond the grasp of the human intellect. But the impulse to seek causes is innate in the soul of man. And the human intellect, with no inkling of the immense variety and complexity of circumstances conditioning a phenomenon, any one of which may be separately conceived of as the cause of it, snatches at the first and most easily understood approximation, and says here is the cause.

There was no deceiving himself: something terrible, new, and more important than anything before in his life, was taking place within him of which he alone was aware.

Drops Dripped. Quiet talk went on. Horses neighed and scuffled. Someone snored.

A monkey was carrying two handfuls of peas. One little pea dropped out. He tried to pick it up, and split twenty. He tried to pick up the twenty, and split them all. Then he lost his temper, scattered the peas in all directions and ran away

Those joys were so small that they passed unnoticed, like gold in sand, and at bad moments she could see nothing but the pain, nothing but sand; but there were good moments too when she saw nothing but the joy, nothing but gold.

Konstantin Levin did not like talking and hearing about the beauty of nature. Words for him took away the beauty of what he saw.

By digging into our souls, we often dig up what might better have remained there unnoticed." Alexis Alexandrovich

This child, with his naive outlook on life was the compass which showed them the degree of their departure from what they knew but did not want to know.

Another's wife is a white swan, and ours is bitter wormwood.

Without knowing what I am and why I am here, life's impossible; and that I can't know, and so I can't live," Levin said to himself.

What energy!' I thought. 'Man has conquered everything, and destroyed millions of plants, yet this one won't submit.

Some one dear to one can be loved with human love; but an enemy can only be loved with divine love.

Nietzsche was stupid and abnormal.