Quotes from Leo Tolstoy

Only then did he understand clearly for the first time what he had not understood when he had led her out of the church after the wedding. He understood not only that she was close to him, but that he no longer knew where she ended and he began. He understood it by the painful feeling of being split which he experienced at that moment. He was offended at first, but in that same instant he felt that he could not be offended by her, that she was him.

If you want to be a clever person, you have to learn how to ask cleverly, how to listen attentively, how to respond quietly, and how to stop talking when there is nothing more to say.

And from the height of this perception all that had previously tormented and preoccupied him suddenly became illumined by a cold white light without shadows, without perspective, without distinction of outline. All life appeared to him like magic-lantern pictures at which he had long been gazing by artificial light through a glass. Now he suddenly saw those badly daubed pictures in clear daylight and without a glass.

While they drove past the garden the shadows of the bare trees often fell across the road and hid the brilliant moonlight, but as soon as they were past the fence, the snowy plain bathed in moonlight and motionless spread out before them glittering like diamonds and dappled with bluish shadows.

Everything is indefinite, misty, and transient; only virtue is clear, and it cannot be destroyed by any force. —MARCUS TULLIUS CICERO

He could not live, because all man's efforts, all his impulses to life, are only efforts to increase freedom. Wealth and poverty, fame and obscurity, power and subordination, strength and weakness, health and disease, culture and ignorance, work and leisure, repletion and hunger, virtue and vice, are only greater or lesser degrees of freedom.

Out of all the vices, the most difficult is ingratitude.

Women are deprived or rights because of their lack of education, and their lack of education comes from having no rights.

Faith—or not faith—I don't know what it is—but this feeling has come just as imperceptibly through suffering, and has taken firm root in my soul.

The prayers to which she surrendered herself most of all were those of repentance. On her way home at an early hour when she met no one but bricklayers going to work or men sweeping the street, and everybody within the houses was still asleep, Natasha experienced a feeling new to her, a sense of the possibility of correcting her faults, the possibility of a new, clean life, and of happiness.

Although that patience did come out, Pierre did not join the army, but remained in deserted Moscow ever in the same state of agitation, irresolution, and alarm, yet at the same time joyfully expecting something terrible.

A spiritual wound produced by a rending of the spiritual body is like a physical wound and, strange as it may seem, just as a deep wound may heal and its edges join, physical and spiritual wounds alike can yet heal completely only as the result of a vital force from within.

We often believe that our life moves forward only when we meet others. This is not true. Our real lives unfold when we are alone, when we are one-on-one with our thoughts. A thought is a great force. This force finds its way out of a person through words, making one's deeds a blessing or a curse, depending on whether it was a good or bad thought. It

No matter what he thought about, he always returned to these same questions which he could not solve and yet could not cease to ask himself. It was as if the thread of the chief screw which held his life together were stripped, so that the screw could not get in or out, but went on turning uselessly in the same place.

O ye, who see perplexities over your heads, beneath your feet, and to the right and left of you; you will be an eternal enigma unto yourselves until ye become humble and joyful as children.

Why does everything exist that exists, and why do I exist?" "Because it exists.

there is no subject so insignificant that it will not expand to infinity, if attention is concentrated on it.

De acuerdo con la fé, para comprender el sentido de la vida debía renunciar a la razón, la misma para la cual es necesario el sentido.

If the conception of freedom appears to reason a senseless contradiction, like the possibility of performing two actions at one and the same instant of time, or of an effect without a cause, that only proves that consciousness is not subject to reason.

Dumnezeu este doar unul ÅŸi acelaÅŸi pretutindeni.

É possível ofender uma pessoa honrada e uma mulher honrada, mas dizer a um ladrão que é um ladrão é apenas la constatation d'un fait.

He who wants results must allow for the means.

And what will be there, and what has there been here? Why was I so reluctant to part with life? There was something in this life I did not and do not understand.

How nicely Turovtsin laughs!" said Levin, admiring his moist eyes and shaking chest.