Quotes from Leo Tolstoy

But why do his ears stick out so oddly? Did he have his hair cut?

So others are even more afraid than I am!" he thought. "So that's all there is in what is called heroism! And heroism! And did I do it for my country's sake? And how was he to blame, with his dimple and blue eyes? And how frightened he was! He thought that I should kill him. Why should I kill him? My hand trembled. And they have given me a St. George's Cross… . I can't make it out at all.

His mother, a dried-up old lady with black eyes and ringlets, screwed up her eyes, scanning her son, and smiled slightly with her thin lips. Getting up from the seat and handing her maid a bag, she gave her little wrinkled hand to her son to kiss, and lifting his head from her hand, kissed him on the cheek.

He who knows only his wife and loves her understands all women better than if he had known a thousand

Self esteem,' said Levin, cut to the quick by his brother's words, 'is something I do not understand. If I had been told at the university that others understood integral calculus and I did not — there you have self esteem. But here one should first be convinced that one needs to have a certain ability in these matters and, chiefly, that they are all very important.

If I desired anything, I knew in advance that whether I satisfied my desire or not, nothing would come of it.

But there was a second kind of people, the real ones, to which they all belonged, for whom the main thing was to be elegant, beautiful, generous, bold, and gay, to give way unblushingly to every passion and to laugh at everything else.

We expect rewards for goodness, and punishments for the bad things which we do. Often, they are not immediately

It is necessary that men, governed by their own feelings, find sensual delight in virtue.

but are you really so in love? - Oh, it is not that at all. It is not that, it is some kind of power that has seized me and holds me. I do not know what to do.

To know love, one must make mistakes and then correct them.

after the murder of the duc there was one martyr more in heaven and one hero less on earth

Life is everything. Life is God. Everything changes and moves and that movement is God. And while there is life there is joy in consciousness of the divine. To love life is to love God. Harder and more blessed than all else is to love this life in one's sufferings, in innocent sufferings.

The same talk, the same thoughts, and always about the same things! And they are all satisfied and confident that it should be so, and will go on living like that till they die.

Amid the scattered property and the crowd on the open space, she in her rich satin cloak with a bright lilac shawl on her head suggested a delicate exotic plant thrown out onto the snow. She

the Lord's Prayer is nothing less than Christ's whole teaching, stated in most concise form

Whatever we may say about the soul going to the sky... we know there is no sky but only an atmosphere.

El secret de la felicitat no és fer sempre el es vol, sinó voler sempre el que es fa

These things are so, because men have ceased to live by their own labour, and have taken to depending on the labour of others. In the old time, men lived according to God's law. They had what was their own, and coveted not what others had produced

Prices too that day indicated the state of affairs. The price of weapons, of gold, of carts and horses, kept rising, but the value of paper money and city articles kept falling, so that by midday there were instances of carters removing valuable goods, such as cloth, and receiving in payment a half of what they carted, while peasant horses were fetching five hundred rubles each, and furniture, mirrors, and bronzes were being given away for nothing.

Tushin did not tell him that there were no covering troops, though that was the plain truth. He was afraid to let down another officer that way and silently, with fixed eyes, looked straight into Bagration's face, as a confused student looks into his examiner's eyes.

Where there's law there's injustice,

Kings are the slaves of history. History, that is, the unconscious, swarmlike life of mankind, uses every moment of a king's life as an instrument for its purposes.

Time is an illusion of life; the life of the past and the future clouds men from the true life of the present.