Quotes from Leo Tolstoy

If the good has a cause, it is no longer the good; if it has a consequence - a reward - it is also not the good. Therefore the good is outside the chain of cause and effect.

Life is everything. Life is God. Everything is in flux and movement, and this movement is God. And while there is life there is pleasure in being conscious of the Godhead. To love life is to love God. The hardest and the most blessed thing is to love this life even in suffering, innocent suffering.

It occurred to him that what he had taken for a perfect impossibility—that he had not lived his life as one should—might in fact be the truth. It occurred to him that those scarcely detected impulses to struggle against what the people of highest social rank considered good, those feeble tendencies that he barely noticed and immediately suppressed, might in fact be what was real, and everything else what was false.

Il pensiero le tornava sempre a un punto: che non c'era nessuno capace d'intendere, neanche lontanamente, tutto quello che lei intendeva, tutto quello che c'era in lei.

The law of God is not to return evil for evil; indeed, if you try in this way to stamp out wickedness it will come upon you all the stronger. It is not difficult for you to kill the man, but his blood will surely stain your own soul. You may think you have killed a bad man--that you have gotten rid of evil--but you will soon find out that the seeds of still greater wickedness have been planted within you.

The most solemn mystery in the world continued

When in the morning he saw the footman, and later his wife, and later his daughter, and later the doctor, every step they took, every word they spoke confirmed the horrible revelation that had been laid bare to him the night before. In them he saw himself and everything he had lived by, and saw clearly that it was all false, all of it a monstrous and immense deceit foreclosing both life and death. The realization amplified his sufferings tenfold.

Yes, what would Russia be without me?" he [Tsar Nicholas I] said to himself, again sensing the approach of the unpleasant feeling. "Yes, what would, not just Russia, but Europe be without me?" And he remembered his brother-in-law, the king of Prussia, and his weakness and stupidity and shook his head.

Freedom? What is the good of freedom? Happiness consists only in loving and desiring: in wishing her wishes and in thinking her thoughts, which means having no freedom whatever; that is happiness!

All that day it seemed to her as though she were acting in a theater with actors cleverer than she, and that her bad acting was spoiling the whole performance. She had come with the intention of staying two days, if all went well. But in the evening, during the game, she made up her mind that she would go home next day.

Stepan Arkadyevitch, who liked a joke, was fond of puzzling a plain man by saying that if he prided himself on his origin, he ought not to stop at Rurik and disown the first founder of his family-- the monkey.

Now she understood that Anna could not have been in lilac, and that her charm was just that she always stood out against her attire, that her dress could never be noticeable on her. And her black dress, with its sumptuous lace, was not noticeable on her; it was only the frame, and all that was seen was she—simple, natural, elegant, and at the same time gay and eager.

It never before happened that the rich ruling and more educated minority, which has the most influence on the masses, not only disbelieved the existing religion but was convinced that no religion is no longer needed.

the chief if not the sole cause of the enslavement of the Indian peoples by the English lies in this very absence of a religious consciousness and of the guidance for conduct which should flow from it—a lack common in our day to all nations East and West, from Japan to England and America alike.

The longer Levin mowed, the more often he felt those moments of oblivion during which it was no longer his arms that swung the scythe, but the scythe itself that lent motion to his whole body, full of life and conscious of itself, and, as if by magic, without a thought of it, the work got rightly and neatly done on its own. These were the most blissful moments.

The smoke from the gun was white as milk over the green of the grass.

Elena Pavlovna was for him [Tsar Nicholas I] the personification of those empty people who talked not only about science and poetry, but also about governing people, imagining that they could govern themselves better than he, Nicholas, governed them.

The child, a little girl with bare legs and long golden curls, was a being perfectly foreign to him, chiefly because she was trained quite otherwise than he wished her to be. There sprang up between the husband and wife the usual misunderstanding, without even the wish to understand each other, and then a silent warfare, hidden from outsiders and tempered by decorum.

This ideal of glory and grandeur--which consists not merely in considering that nothing wrong that one does but in priding oneself on every crime once commits.

The news of Kitty's friendship with Mme Stahl and Varenka, and the observations conveyed to him by the princess about some change that had taken place in Kitty, troubled the prince and provoked in him the usual feeling of jealousy towards everything that interested his daughter to the exclusion of himself, and a fear lest his daughter escape from his influence into some spheres inaccessible to him.

sole meaning of life is to serve humanity.

He fought as a prisoner sentenced to death fights the executioner, knowing that he cannot prevail; and with each minute he felt, despite all the efforts of his struggle, that he was getting closer and closer to what terrified him.

Se?am se da sam u jednom od stotine romana koje sam to leto pro?itao našao jednog preterano strasnog junaka s gustim obrvama i toliko sam zaželeo da li?im na njega po spoljašnjosti (moralno sam se ose?ao sasvim isti on), da sam posmatraju?i svoje obrve pred ogledalom došao na misao da ih malo podšišam, da bi mi porasle guš?e.

Se poate afla cu u?urin?? cât fier ?i ce metale se g?sesc în soare ?i în stele,dar s? sco?i la iveal? tic?lo?ia noastr? e greu,îngrozitor de greu...