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| Link | Quote | Stars | Tags | Author |
| 2c9d5c1 | But when, as is most often the case, the husband and wife accept the external obligation to live together all their lives and have, by the second month, come to loathe the sight of each other, want to get divorced and yet go on living together, it usually ends in that terrible hell that drives them to drink, makes them shoot themselves, kill and poison each other | marriage murder love problems | Leo Tolstoy | |
| f044d7b | They abolish the external form, they suppress the formal sales of slaves, and then they imagine and assure others that slavery is abolished. They are unwilling to see that it still exists, since people, as before, like to profit by the labor of others, and think it good and just. This being given, there will always be found beings stronger or more cunning than others to profit thereby. The same thing happens in the emancipation of woman. At.. | Leo Tolstoy | ||
| 1e12170 | One man may not kill. If he kills a fellow-creature, he is a murderer. If two, ten, a hundred men do so, they, too, are murderers. But a government or a nation may kill as many men as it chooses, and that will not be murder, but a great and noble action. Only gather the people together on a large scale, and a battle of ten thousand men becomes an innocent action. But precisely how many people must there be to make it so?--that is the questi.. | Leo Tolstoy | ||
| b70c0b1 | To take the simplest example: one man laughs, and another, who hears, becomes merry; or a man weeps, and another, who hears, feels sorrow. A man is excited or irritated, and another man, seeing him, comes to a similar state of mind. By his movements, or by the sounds of his voice, a man expresses courage and determination, or sadness and calmness, and this state of mind passes on to others. A man suffers, expressing his sufferings by groans.. | Leo Tolstoy | ||
| ea5341f | I do not live when I loose belief in the existence of God. I should long ago have killed myself had I not had a dim hope of finding Him. I live really live only when I feel him and seek Him | suicide god meaning-of-life | Leo Tolstoy | |
| f1a7f13 | Answer me two more questions,' said the King. 'The first is, Why did the earth bear such grain then and has ceased to do so now? And the second is, Why your grandson walks with two crutches, your son with one, and you yourself with none? Your eyes are bright, your teeth sound, and your speech clear and pleasant to the ear. How have these things come about?' | Leo Tolstoy | ||
| 772dac7 | there was apparent in all a sort of anxiety, a softening of the heart, and a consciousness of some great, unfathomable mystery being accomplished... the most solemn mystery in the world was being accomplished. Evening passed, night came on. And the feeling of suspense and softening of the heart before the unfathomable did not wane, but grew more intense. No one slept. | Leo Tolstoy | ||
| 74fcb97 | Our existence is now so entirely in contradiction with the doctrine of Jesus, that only with the greatest difficulty can we understand its meaning. We have been so deaf to the rules of life that he has given us, to his explanations,--not only when he commands us not to kill, but when he warns us against anger, when he commands us not to resist evil, to turn the other cheek, to love our enemies; we are so accustomed to speak of a body of men.. | Leo Tolstoy | ||
| b2fb877 | War is the most painful act of subjection to the laws of God that can be required of the human will. | war | Leo Tolstoy | |
| e0b04ac | Formerly (it had begun almost from childhood and kept growing till full maturity), whenever he had tried to do something that would be good for everyone, for mankind, for Russia, for the district, for the whole village, he had noticed that thinking about it was pleasant, but the doing itself was always awkward, there was no full assurance that the thing was absolutely necessary, and the doing itself, which at the start had seemed so big, ke.. | Leo Tolstoy | ||
| e755308 | He spoke with such self-confidence that his hearers could not be sure whether what he said was very witty or very stupid. | Leo Tolstoy | ||
| cb2b282 | This foolish smile he could not forgive himself. | Leo Tolstoy | ||
| 95948ef | I had begun to feel that life was a repetition of the same thing; that there was nothing new either in me or in him; and that, on the contrary, we kept going back as it were on what was old. | marriage relationships old-habits stagnant | Leo Tolstoy | |
| a8789ca | He had committed no evil action, but, what was far worse than an evil action, he had entertained evil thoughts, whence evil actions proceed. An evil action may not be repeated, and can be repented of; but evil thoughts generate all evil actions. An evil action only smooths the path for other evil acts; evil thoughts uncontrollably drag one along that path. | Leo Tolstoy | ||
| acb446c | We exchanged disagreeable remarks. The impression of this first quarrel was terrible. I say quarrel, but the term is inexact. It was the sudden discovery of the abyss that had been dug between us. | Leo Tolstoy | ||
| d258a93 | There was no solution, but that universal solution which life gives to all questions, even the most complex and insoluble. That answer is: one must live in the needs of the day--that is, forget oneself. | Leo Tolstoy | ||
| 66e4c9b | But neither of them dared speak of it, and not having expressed the one thing that occupied their thoughts, whatever they said rang false. | Leo Tolstoy | ||
| 4f713c0 | The most important acts, both for the one who accomplishes them and for his fellow creatures, are those that have remote consequences. | Leo Tolstoy | ||
| c19c042 | My writing is like those little carved baskets made in prisons... | writing | Leo Tolstoy | |
| d97493f | Now he experienced a feeling akin to that of a man whom while calmly crossing a bridge over a precipice, should suddenly discover that the bridge is broken, and that there is a chasm below. That chasm was life itself, the bridge that artificial life in which Aleksey Aleksandrovich had lived. | Leo Tolstoy | ||
| fdc2c50 | The little princess, like an old war horse that hears the trumpet, unconsciously and quite forgetting her condition, prepared for the familiar gallop of coquetry, without any ulterior motive or any struggle, but with naive and lighthearted gaiety. | Leo Tolstoy | ||
| fa11d51 | A man cannot get rid of the responsibility, for his own actions. | Leo Tolstoy | ||
| d739bbe | Therein is the whole business of one's life; to seek out and save in the soul that which is perishing. | Leo Tolstoy | ||
| 0d142bd | In the depths of his heart Vasili Andreevich knew that it could not yet be near morning, but he was growing more and more afraid, and wished both to get to know and yet to deceive himself. | Leo Tolstoy | ||
| 20b51ba | Pierre's insanity consisted in not waiting, as he used to do, to discover personal attributes which he termed "good qualities" in people before loving them; his heart was now overflowing with love, and by loving people without cause he discovered indubitable causes for loving them." | Leo Tolstoy | ||
| 9482a89 | But the more intensely he thought, the clearer it became to him that it was indubitably so, that in reality, looking upon life, he had forgotten one little fact-that death will come, and all ends; that nothing was even worth beginning, and that there was no helping it anyway. Yes it was awful, but it was so. | Leo Tolstoy | ||
| 25998cc | The thought that he might, and very probably would die that night occurred to him, but did not seem particularly unpleasant or dreadful. It did not seem particularly unpleasant, because his whole life had been not a continual holiday, but on the contrary an unceasing round of toil of which he was beginning to feel weary. And it did not seem particularly dreadful, because besides the masters he had served here, like Vasili Andreevich, he alw.. | Leo Tolstoy | ||
| 94f3c7e | False faith is the major cause of most of our misfortunes. The purpose of a human life is to bring the irrational beginning of our life to a rational beginning. In order to succeed in this, two things are important: (1) to see all irrational, unwise things in life and direct your attention to them and study them; (2) to understand the possibility of a rational, wise life. The major purpose of all teachers of mankind was the understanding of.. | Leo Tolstoy | ||
| dc935b5 | They say: misfortunes, sufferings...well, if someone said to me right now, this minute: do you want to remain the way you were before captivity, or live through it all over again? For God's sake, captivity again and horsemeat! Once we're thrown off our habitual paths, we think all is lost; but it's only here that the new and the good begins. As long as there's life, there's happiness. There's much, much still to come. | suffering war-and-peace | Leo Tolstoy | |
| 9e28fdc | Yes, it is very likely that I shall be killed tomorrow,' he thought. And suddenly at this thought of death a whole series of most distant, most intimate, memories rose in his imagination: he remembered his last parting from his father and his wife; he remembered the days when he first loved her. He thought of her pregnancy and felt sorry for her and for himself, and in a nervously emotional and softened mood he went out of the hut in which .. | Leo Tolstoy | ||
| 6dd56bb | Even philanthropy did not have the desired effect. The genuine as well as the false paper money which flooded Moscow lost its value. The French, collecting booty, cared only for gold. Not only was the paper money valueless which Napoleon so graciously distributed to the unfortunate, but even silver lost its value in relation to gold. | Leo Tolstoy | ||
| 5221ef4 | Levin had often noticed in discussions between the most intelligent people that after enormous efforts, and an enormous expenditure of logical subtleties and words, the disputants finally arrived at being aware that what they had so long been struggling to prove to one another had long ago, from the beginning of the argument, been known to both, but that they liked different things, and would not define what they liked for fear of its being.. | Leo Tolstoy | ||
| b4a8680 | He saw either death or the approach of it everywhere. But his undertaking now occupied him all the more. He had to live his life to the end, until death came. Darkness covered everything for him; but precisely because of this darkness he felt that his undertaking was the only guiding thread in this darkness, and he seized it and held on to it with all his remaining strength. | death despair dying | Leo Tolstoy | |
| 3ec2701 | from ] For a historian considering the achievement of a certain aim, there are heroes; for the artist treating of a man's relation to all sides of life there cannot and should not be heroes, but there should be men. | truth | Leo Tolstoy | |
| e7e8a2b | It's beyond everything what's being done in the district, according to what this doctor tells me. He's a very intelligent fellow. And as I've told you before, I tell you again; it's not right for you not to go to the meetings, and altogether to keep out of the district business. If decent people won't go into it, of course it's bound to go all wrong. We pay the money, and it all goes in salaries, and there are no schools, not district nurse.. | Leo Tolstoy | ||
| 12d1d7e | from | Leo Tolstoy | ||
| c73bbae | I shall go on in the same way, losing my temper with Ivan the coachman, falling into angry discussions, expressing my opinions tactlessly; there will be still the same wall between the holy of holies of my soul and other people, even my wife; I shall still go on scolding her for my own terror, and being remorseful for it; I shall still be as unable to understand with my reason why I pray, and I shall still go on praying; but my life now, my.. | Leo Tolstoy | ||
| 99c8cfe | All that exists is One. People only call this One by different names. | Leo Tolstoy | ||
| 040d292 | She felt as though everything were beginning to be double in her soul, just as objects sometimes appear double to over-tired eyes. She hardly knew at times what it was she feared, and what she hoped for. Whether she feared or desired what had happened, or what was going to happen, and exactly what she longed for, she could not have said. | Leo Tolstoy | ||
| cd9561c | And the slaves prided themselves on their master, saying: 'There is no better lord than ours under the sun. He feeds and clothes us well, and gives us work suited to our strength. He bears no malice, and never speaks a harsh word to any one. He is not like other masters, who treat their slaves worse than cattle: punishing them whether they deserve it or not, and never giving them a friendly word. He wishes us well, does good, and speaks kin.. | Leo Tolstoy | ||
| 9b306ee | He spoke that refined French in which our grandparents not only spoke bit thought... | Leo Tolstoy | ||
| 32da34c | Natasha, with a vigorous turn from her heel on to her toe, walked over to the middle of the room and stood still... Natasha took the first note, her throat swelled, her bosom heaved, a serious expression came into her face. She was thinking of no one and of nothing at that moment, and from her smiling mouth poured forth notes, those notes that anyone can produce at the same intervals, and hold for the same length of time, yet a thousand tim.. | Leo Tolstoy | ||
| 1b48b47 | As he looked round, she too turned her head .Her shining gray eyes, that looked dark from the thick lashes, rested with friendly attention on his face, as though she were recognizing him, and then promptly turned away to the passing crowd, as though seeking someone. In that brief look Vronsky had time to notice the suppressed eagerness which played over her face, and flitted between the brilliant eyes and faint smile that curved her red lip.. | Leo Tolstoy | ||
| b6a4fa5 | He suddenly felt that the very thing that had once been the source of his suffering had become the source of his spiritual joy, that what had seemed insoluble when he condemned, reproached and hated, became simple and clear when he forgave and loved. | Leo Tolstoy |