Quotes from Leo Tolstoy

La cosa estaría bien si supiéramos dónde ir a buscar la ayuda que se necesita para esta vida y qué nos espera después, más allá de la tumba.

I know how men like Stiva look at it. You speak of his talking of you with her. That never happened. Such men are unfaithful, but their home and wife are sacred to them. Somehow or other these women are still looked on with contempt by them, and do not touch on their feeling for their family. They draw a sort of line that can't be crossed between them and their families. I don't understand it, but it is so.

I know fiery horses by their brand, and I know young people who are in love by their eyes

Nicholas felt a dread of their wanting to take him away from surroundings in which, protected from all the entanglements of life, he was living so calmly and quietly. He felt that sooner or later he would have to re-enter that whirlpool of life, with its embarrassments and affairs to be straightened out, its accounts with stewards, quarrels, and intrigues, its ties, society,

My field was God's earth. Wherever I ploughed, there was my field. Land was free. It was a thing no man called his own. Labor was the only thing men called their own.

With painful dejection he awaited the end of this action, in which he regarded himself as a participant and which he was unable to arrest. A personal, human feeling for a brief moment got the better of the artificial phantasm of life he had served so long. He felt in his own person the sufferings and death he had witnessed on the battlefield. The heaviness of his head and chest reminded him of the possibility of suffering and death for himself.

I have the honor to report, sir, that only eight rounds are left. Are we to continue firing?" he asked.

At the fact that I'm unable to think up a situation in which life would not be suffering, that we're all created in order to suffer, and that we all know it and keep thinking up ways of deceiving ourselves. But if you see the truth, what can you do?

Low as was his opinion of Golenishtchev's capacity for understanding art, trifling as was the true remark upon the fidelity of the expression of Pilate as an official, and offensive as might have seemed the utterance of so unimportant an observation while nothing was said of more serious points, Mihailov was in an ecstasy of delight at this observation.

Is there a line to be drawn between psychological and physiological phenomena in man? and if so, where?

Every answer from faith gives the finite existence of man a meaning of the infinite - a meaning that is not destroyed by suffering, privations and death. That means in faith alone can one find the meaning and potential of life.

But tie yourself up with a woman and, like a chained convict, you lose all freedom! And all you have of hope and strength merely weighs you down and torments you with regret.

Man is flowing. In him there are all possibilities: he was stupid, now he is clever; he was evil, now he is good, and the other way around. In this is the greatness of man.

I lost my life over that curtain as I might have done when storming a fort. Is that possible? How terrible and how stupid. It can't be true! It can't, but it is.

If you can forgive me, forgive me,' said her eyes, 'I am so happy.' 'I hate them all, and you, and myself,' his eyes responded.

Now, in that moment, he knew that neither all his doubts, nor the impossibility he knew in himself of believing by means of reason, hindered him in the least from addressing God. It all blew off his soul like dust.

Don't steal the rolls!

Is he aiming at doing anything, or simply undoing what's been done? It's the great misfortune of our government—this paper administration, of which he's a worthy representative.

Alexey Alexandrovitch bowed his head in assent.

In all history there is no war which was not hatched by the governments, the governments alone, independent of the interests of the people, to whom war is always pernicious even when successful. Read more at

Quedaban sólo escasos períodos de amos, que se hacían muy breves. Eran Islotes en los cuales atracaban un momento, para luego adentrarse de nuevo en el mar de la hostilidad latente, expresada en el alejamiento mutuo en que vivían

And for him, who lived in a certain circle, and who required some mental activity such as usually develops with maturity, having views was as necessary as having a hat.

She understood he became a monk in order to be above those who considered his superiors...it led him to God, to his childhood`s faith which had never been destroyed in him...

Looking into Napoleon's eyes Prince Andrew thought of the insignificance of greatness, the unimportance of life which no one could understand, and the still greater unimportance of death, the meaning of which no one alive could understand or explain.