Quotes from Leo Tolstoy

Tell your wife that I love her as before, and if she cannot forgive me my situation, I wish her never to forgive me. In order to forgive, one must have lived through what I have lived through, and may God spare her that.

But really, why should you distress yourself? Whoever stirs up the past — out with his eye! Who is not a sinner before God and to blame before the Tsar, as the saying is?

Cor, what a godawful stink!" That was all that remained of this man in the land of the living.

Anna took a knife and fork in her beautiful, white, ring-adorned hands and began to demonstrate. She obviously could see that her explanation could not make anything understood, but, knowing that her speech was pleasant and her hands were beautiful, she went on explaining.

The objection that the doctrine of Jesus is excellent but impracticable, comes not only from believers, but from sceptics, from those who do not believe, or think that they do not believe, in the dogmas of the fall of man and the redemption; from men of science and philosophers who consider themselves free from all prejudice. They believe, or imagine that they believe, in nothing, and so consider themselves as above such a superstition as the dogma of the fall and the redemption.

But if man, as in our society, advances only towards physical love, even though he surrounds it with deceptions and with the shallow formality of marriage, he obtains nothing but licensed vice.

Medieval Italian life had recently become so fascinating for Vronsky that he even began wearing his hat and a wrap thrown over his shoulder in a medieval fashion, which was very becoming to him.

War is not courtesy but the most horrible thing in life; and we ought to understand that and not play at war. We ought to accept this terrible necessity sternly and seriously. It all lies in that: get rid of falsehood and let war be war and not a game. As it is now, war is the favorite pastime of the idle and frivolous.

The only certain happiness in life is to live for others.

The truth was that life is meaningless. I had as it were lived, lived, and walked, walked, till I had come to a precipice and saw clearly that there was nothing ahead of me but destruction. It was impossible to stop, impossible to go back, and impossible to close my eyes or avoid seeing that there was nothing ahead but suffering and real death -- complete annihilation.

questions which weren't solved by diplomats, would be less solved with powder and blood.

mentioning 'our days' as people of limited intelligence are fond of doing, imagining that they have discovered and appraised the peculiarities of 'our days' and that human characteristics change with the times...

Levin felt more and more that all his thoughts about marriage, all his dreams of how he would arrange his life, were mere childishness, and that it was something he had not understood before, and now understood still less, though it was being accomplished over him; spasms were rising higher and higher in his breast, and disobedient tears were coming to his eyes.

I united myself with my forefathers: the father, mother, and grandparents I loved. They and all my predecessors believed and lived, and they produced me.

Pierre had for the first time experienced that strange and fascinating feeling in the Slobodsky palace, when he suddenly felt that wealth and power and life, all that men build up and guard with such effort ,is only worth anything through the joy with which it can all be cast away.

either the war is insanity, or the people, if they do this insanity, aren't not at all reasonable creatures, as some might , for some reason, think.

It is generally supposed the Conservatives are usually old people, and that those in favour of change are the young. That is not quite correct. Usually Conservatives are young people: those who want to live but who do not think about how to live, and have not time to think, and therefore take as a model for themselves a way of life that they have seen.

I regard Christianity neither as an inclusive divine revelation nor as an historical phenomenon, but as a teaching which-gives us the meaning of life.

Prince Andrey glanced at Kutuzov, and unconsciously his eyes were caught by the carefully washed seams of the scar on his temple, where the bullet had gone through his head at Ismail, and the empty eyesocket, not a yard from him. "Yes, he has the right to speak so calmly of the destruction of these men," thought Bolkonsky.

Now they are playing." (He heard through the door the distant sound of a song and its accompaniment.) "It's all the same to them, but they will die too! Fools! I first, and they later, but it will be the same for them. And now they are merry... the beasts!

Blizzard or no blizzard I start out. So business gets done. They think money making is a joke. No, take pains and rack your brains.

Then the doctor, a young man, not quite a Nihilist perhaps, but you know, eats with his knife...but a very good doctor.

He used to say that there were only two sources of human vice: idleness and superstition; and that there were only two virtues: activity and intelligence.

Like all those who live in touch with nature and have known want, he was patient and could wait for hours, even days without growing restless or irritable