Quotes from Leo Tolstoy

War is the most painful act of subjection to the laws of God that can be required of the human will.

and if one loves, one loves the whole person as he or she is, and not as one might wish them to be.

The terrible thing is that it's impossible to tear the past out by the roots.

Now one often saw only her face and body, while her soul was not seen at all.

Their daughter came in in full evening dress, her fresh young flesh exposed (making a show of that very flesh which in his own case caused so much suffering), strong, healthy, evidently in love, and impatient with illness, suffering, and death, because they interfered with her happiness. Fyodor

I had begun to feel that life was a repetition of the same thing; that there was nothing new either in me or in him; and that, on the contrary, we kept going back as it were on what was old.

Come, what did I say, repeat it? he would ask. But I could never repeat anything, so ludicrous it seemed that he should talk to me, not of himself or me, but of something else, as though it mattered what happened outside us. Only much later I began to have some slight understanding of his cares and to be interested in them.

One might murder and steal and yet be happy

Nice passion is reading

There was no solution, but that universal solution which life gives to all questions, even the most complex and insoluble. That answer is: one must live in the needs of the day—that is, forget oneself.

He stepped down trying not to look long at her, as though she were the sun, yet he saw her as one sees the sun, without looking.

No, you're not going to get away from us, and you're not going to be different, you're going to be the same as you've always been; with doubts, ever lasting dissatisfaction with yourself, vain efforts to improve, and failures, and continual expectations of happiness that has eluded you and that isn't possible for you.

He felt that in the depth of his soul something had been put in its place, settled down, and laid to rest.

My writing is like those little carved baskets made in prisons…

Now he experienced a feeling akin to that of a man whom while calmly crossing a bridge over a precipice, should suddenly discover that the bridge is broken, and that there is a chasm below. That chasm was life itself, the bridge that artificial life in which Aleksey Aleksandrovich had lived.

For the first time in his life he knew the bitterest sort of misfortune, misfortune beyond remedy, misfortune his own fault.

Therein is the whole business of one's life; to seek out and save in the soul that which is perishing.

If you look for perfection, you will never be satisfied.

Pierre] involuntarily started comparing these two men, so different and at the same time so similar, because of the love he had for both of them, and because both had lived and both had died.

A writer is precious and necessary for us only to the extent to which he reveals to us the inner labour of his soul.

He had never thought the question over clearly, but vaguely imagined that his wife had long suspected him of being unfaithful to her and was looking the other way. It even seemed to him that she, a worn-out, aged, no longer beautiful woman, not remarkable for anything, simple, merely a kind mother of a family, ought in all fairness to be indulgent. It turned out to be quite the opposite.

the superfluity of the comforts of like destroys all joy in satisfying one's needs, while great freedom in the choice of occupation...is just what makes the choice of occupation insoluble difficult and destroys the need and even the possibility of having an occupation. p 1209

He was fond of angling, and seemed proud of being able to like such a stupid occupation.

Lord have mercy! Pardon and help us!" he repeated the words that suddenly and unexpectedly sprang to his lips. And he, an unbeliever, repeated those words not with his lips only. At that instant he knew that neither his doubts nor the impossibility of believing with his reason- of which he was conscious- all prevented his appealing to God. It all flew off like dust. To whom should he appeal, if not to Him in whose hands he felt himself, his soul, and his love, to be?