Quotes from Leo Tolstoy

Just fancy! One can hear and see the grass growing,' thought Levin, as he noticed wet slate-coloured aspen leaf move close to the point of a blade of grass.

The spirit of an army is the factor which multiplied by the mass gives the resulting force. To define and express the significance of this unknown factor—the spirit of an army—is a problem for science.

Well, dear heart,' said he, 'I wanted to tell you about it yesterday, and I have come to do so today. I've never experienced anything like it before. I am in love, my friend!' Suddenly Pierre heaved a deep sigh and dumped his heavy person down on the sofa beside Prince Andrei. 'With Natasha Rostova, yes?' said he.

Of course, if everybody insists on it, there's no help for it.… But believe me, my dear boy, the two most powerful warriors are patience and time:

Pfuel was one of those theoreticians who so love their theory that they lose sight of the theory's object—its practical application. His love of theory made him hate everything practical, and he would not listen to it. He was even pleased by failures, for failures resulting from deviations in practice from the theory only proved to him the accuracy of his theory.

It is very difficult to tell the truth, and young people are rarely capable of it. His

All these traces of his life seemed to clutch him, and to say to him: "No, you're not going to get away from us, and you're not going to be different, but you're going to be the same as you've always been; with doubts, everlasting dissatisfaction with yourself, vain efforts to amend, and falls, and everlasting expectation, of a happiness which you won't get, and which isn't possible for you.

It is generally supposed that governments strengthen their forces only to defend the state from other states, in oblivion of the fact that armies are necessary, before all things, for the defense of governments from their own oppressed and enslaved subjects.

Anna Arkadyevna read and understood, but it was unpleasant for her to read, that is, to follow the reflection of other people's lives. She wanted too much to live herself.

The sense of human freedom, it seems to Tolstóy, is given only to those who have suffered. In

How can one feel well when one is suffering in moral sense? Can any sensitive person find peace of mind nowadays?

Kitty felt that Anna was perfectly unaffected and was not trying to conceal anything, but that she lived in another, higher world full of complex poetic interests beyond Kitty's reach.

All of us, especially you women, have to go for themselves through all the nonsense of life to come back to life itself

Man must not check reason by tradition, but contrariwise, must check tradition by reason.

Why did millions of people kill one another when it has been known since the world began that it is physically and morally bad to do so? Because it was such an inevitable necessity that in doing it men fulfilled the elemental zoological law which bees fulfill when they kill one another in autumn, and which causes male animals to destroy one another. One can give no other reply to that terrible question.

Only when Prince Andrei was gone did Rostov think of what he ought to have said. And he was still more angry at having omitted to say it. He

Here the conversation seemed interesting and he stood waiting for an opportunity to express his own views, as young people are fond of doing.

Sorrow is sent by Him, not by men. Men are His instruments, they are not to blame. If you think someone has wronged you, forget it and forgive! We have no right to punish. And then you will know the happiness of forgiving.

I wish to understand in such a way that everything that is inexplicable shall present itself to me as being necessarily inexplicable, and not as being something I am under an arbitrary obligation to believe.

Prince Hippolyte, under pretense of helping, was in everyone's way.

His life meanwhile continued as before, with the same infatuations and dissipations. He liked to dine and drink well, and though he considered it immoral and humiliating could not resist the temptations of the bachelor circles in which he moved.

And it never enters anyone's head that the recognition of a greatness not measurable by the measure of good and bad is only a recognition of one's own insignificance and immeasurable littleness. For us, with the measures of good and bad given us by Christ, nothing is immeasurable. And there is no greatness where there is no simplicity, goodness, and truth.

During this journey it was as if he again thought over his whole life and reached the same old comforting and hopeless conclusion: that there was no need for him to start anything, that he had to live out his life without doing evil, without anxiety, and without wishing for anything.

in every individual a spiritual element is manifested that gives life to all that exists, and that this spiritual element strives to unite with everything of a like nature to itself, and attains this aim through love.