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| Link | Quote | Stars | Tags | Author |
| 9258267 | It occurred to him that his scarcely perceptible attempts to struggle against what was considered good by the most highly placed people, those scarcely noticeable impulses which he had immediately suppressed, might have been the real thing, and all the rest false. | morality inspiration life philosophy societal-expectations society human-nature psychology | Leo Tolstoy | |
| c3d969c | That's my one desire, to be caught," answered Vronsky, with his serene, | mischievous rouge sly vronsky | Leo Tolstoy | |
| 5adf506 | In reality it was just what is usually seen in the houses of people of moderate means who want to appear rich, and therefore succeed only in resembling others like themselves: there are damasks, dark wood, plants, rugs, and dull and polished bronzes -- all the things people of a certain class have in order to resemble other people of that class. His house was so like the others that it would never have been noticed, but to him it .. | Leo Tolstoy | ||
| f44909e | One need only posit some threat to the public tranquility and any action can be justified. All the horrors of the reign of terror were based on concern for public tranquility. | Leo Tolstoy | ||
| 8eaa656 | A better life can only come when the consciousness of men is altered for the better; and therefore, those who wish to improve life must direct all their efforts towards changing both their own and other people's consciousness. | Leo Tolstoy | ||
| 3edca47 | The position occupied by Toporoff, involving as it did an incongruity of purpose, could only be held by a dull man devoid of moral sensibility. Toporoff possessed both these negative qualities. The incongruity of the position he occupied was this: It was his duty to keep up and to defend, by external measures, not excluding violence, that Church which, by its own declaration, was established by God Himself and could not be shaken by the gat.. | religion state-religion incongruity | Leo Tolstoy | |
| 641999c | Among the people to whom he belonged, nothing was written or talked about at that time except the Serbian war. Everything that the idle crowd usually does to kill time, it now did for the benefit of the Slavs: balls, concerts, dinners, speeches, ladies' dresses, beer, restaurants--all bore witness to our sympathy with the Slavs. With much that was spoken and written on the subject Konyshev did not agree in detail. He saw that the Slav quest.. | realist-fiction society-novel manners novel | Leo Tolstoy | |
| 15dd39e | If once we begin judging and arguing about everything, nothing sacred will be left! | Leo Tolstoy | ||
| 134bc92 | 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. Then will ye find Me, and having found Me in yourselves, you will rule over worlds, and looking out from the great world within to the little world without, you will bless everything that is, and find all is well with time and with you. KRISHNA. | Leo Tolstoy | ||
| 00bae13 | He had learned that, as there is no situation in the world in which a man can be happy and perfectly free, so there is no situation in the world in which he can be perfectly unhappy and unfree | Leo Tolstoy | ||
| f3cc1e7 | Love them that hate you, but you can't love them whom you hate. | relationships love | Leo Tolstoy | |
| 2e15e24 | The younger sister was piqued, and in turn disparaged the life of a tradesman, and stood up for that of a peasant. "I would not change my way of life for yours," said she. "We may live roughly, but at least we are free from anxiety. You live in better style than we do, but though you often earn more than you need, you are very likely to lose all you have. You know the proverb, 'Loss and gain are brothers twain.' It often happens that people.. | Leo Tolstoy | ||
| d4bf508 | Why ask? Why doubt what you cannot help knowing? Why use words when words cannot express what one feels? | Leo Tolstoy | ||
| 09ed7d0 | When the peasants and their song had vanished from his sight and hearing, a heavy feeling of anguish at his loneliness, his bodily idleness, his hostility to this world, came over him...It was all drowned in the sea of cheerful common labor. God had given the day, God had given the strength. Both day and strength had been devoted to labour and in that lay the reward...Levin had often admired this life, had often experienced a feeling of env.. | work life meaningful-life simple simplicity | Leo Tolstoy | |
| e9700a6 | Well, what is that to me? I can't see her!" she cried." | Leo Tolstoy | ||
| 3fad8dc | There never has been and cannot be a good life without self-control. Apart from self-control no good life is imaginable. | self-control | Leo Tolstoy | |
| b696419 | Forgive me not according to my unworthiness, but according to thy loving kindness. | Leo Tolstoy | ||
| 6b82e4b | So you make a sacrifice!' he threw special emphasis on the last word. 'Well, so do I. What could be better? We complete in generosity--what an example of family happiness! | Leo Tolstoy | ||
| 435e4cb | Doctors came to see her singly and in consultation, talked much in French, German, and Latin, blamed one another, and prescribed a great variety of medicines for all the diseases known to them, but the simple idea never occurred to any of them that they could not know the disease that Natasha was suffering from, as no disease suffered by a by a live man can be known, for every living person has his own peculiarities and always has his own p.. | Leo Tolstoy | ||
| 49b20cb | Stepan Arkadyevitch had not chosen his political opinions or his views; these political opinions and views had come to him of themselves, just as he did not choose the shapes of his hat and coat, but simply took those that were being worn. And for him, living in a certain society--owing to the need, ordinarily developed at years of discretion, for some degree of mental activity--to have views was just as indispensable as to have a hat. If t.. | Leo Tolstoy | ||
| a9edc58 | We will never arrive to the notion of total freedom, that is, the absence of cause | Leo Tolstoy | ||
| 247d6ee | Who am I? I am that which thou hast searched for since thy baby eyes gazed wonderingly upon the world, whose horizon hides this real life from thee. I am that which in thy heart thou hast prayed for, demanded as thy birthright, although thou hast not known what it was. I am that which has lain in thy soul for hundreds and thousands of years. Sometimes I lay in thee grieving because thou didst not recognize me; sometimes I raised my head, op.. | Leo Tolstoy | ||
| ec229a8 | It was better not to remember such terrible details. | Leo Tolstoy | ||
| cde9534 | Since the moment when, at the sigh of his beloved and dying brother, Levin for the first time looked at the questions of life and death in the light of the new convictions, as he called them...he had been less horrified by death than by life without the least knowledge of whence it came, what it is for, why, and what it is. Organisms, their destruction, the indestructibility of matter, the law of the conservation of energy, development--the.. | Leo Tolstoy | ||
| 8f83259 | Why did you give me a freedom for which I was unfit? Why did you stop teaching me? If you wished it, if you guided me differently, none of all this would happened. I should not now be punished, for no fault at all, by your indifference and even contempt, and you would not have taken from me unjustly all that I valued in life. Let us be thankful that there is an end of the old emotions and excitements. That day ended a romance of our marri.. | Leo Tolstoy | ||
| edd2159 | One may deal with things without love...but you cannot deal with men without it...It cannot be otherwise, because natural love is the fundamental law of human life. | mankind life love natural-laws | Leo Tolstoy | |
| 33385de | Consciously a man lives on his own account in freedom of willbut he serves as an unconscious instrument in bringing about the historical ends of humanity. An act he has once committed is irrecvocable, and that act of his, coinciding in time with millions of acts of others, has an historical value... 'The hearts of kinds are in the hand of God.' The king is the slave of history... Every action that seems to them an act of their own freewill,.. | Leo Tolstoy | ||
| afeb3bd | You wait a bit, wait a bit," said Stepan Arkadyevitch, smiling and touching his hand. "I've told you what I know, and I repeat that in this delicate and tender matter, as far as one can conjecture, I believe the chances are in your favor." | Leo Tolstoy | ||
| 1c11e4f | Do not seek quiet and rest in those earthly realms where delusions and desires are engendered, for if thou dost, thou wilt be dragged through the rough wilderness of life, which is far from Me. | Leo Tolstoy | ||
| 548d178 | And I, too, am the same... only there is no love in my heart, or desire for love, no interest in work, not contentment in myself. And how remote and impossible my old religious enthusiasms seem now... and my former abounding life! What once seemed so plain and right - that happiness lay in living for others - is unintelligible now. Why live for others, when life has not attractions even for oneself? | Leo Tolstoy | ||
| f3b55ed | When the examination was over, the doctor looked at his watch, and then Praskovya Fyodorovna informed Ivan Ilyich that it must of course be as he liked, but she had sent today for a celebrated doctor, and that he would examine him, and have a consultation with Mihail Danilovich (that was the name of his regular doctor). 'Don't oppose it now, please. This I'm doing entirely for my own sake,' she said ironically, meaning it to be understood t.. | Leo Tolstoy | ||
| 662e0b0 | She began to wish he would die; yet she did not want him to die because then his salary would cease. And this irritated her against him still more. She considered herself dreadfully unhappy just because not even his death could save her, | Leo Tolstoy | ||
| e057811 | Then these moments of perplexity began to recur oftener and oftener, and always in the same form. They were always expressed by the questions: What is it for? What does it lead to? At first it seemed to me that these were aimless and irrelevant questions. I thought that it was all well known, and that if I should ever wish to deal with the solution it would not cost me much effort; just at present I had no time for it, but when I wanted to .. | Leo Tolstoy | ||
| c53c1b3 | You understand that the feeling which makes them work is not a feeling of pettiness, ambition, forgetfulness, which you have yourself experienced, but a different sentiment, one more powerful, and one which has made of them men who live with their ordinary composure under the fire of cannon, amid hundreds of chances of death, instead of the one to which all men are subject who live under these conditions amid incessant labor, poverty, and d.. | Leo Tolstoy | ||
| 11ebb0c | Perhaps because I rejoice in what I have, and don't fret for what I haven't | Leo Tolstoy | ||
| 105af4d | Enjoyment lies in the search for truth, not in finding it | Leo Tolstoy | ||
| a1c87ba | Only Anna was sad. She knew that now, from Dolly's departure, no one again would stir up within her soul the feelings that had been roused by their conversation. It hurt her to stir up these feelings, but yet she knew that that was the best part of her soul, and that that part of her soul would quickly be smothered in the life she was leading. | Leo Tolstoy | ||
| 09ab0eb | Stepan Arkadyevitch was on familiar terms with almost all his acquaintances, and called almost all of them by their Christian names: old men of sixty, boys of twenty, actors, ministers, merchants, and adjutant-generals, so that many of his intimate chums were to be found at the extreme ends of the social ladder, and would have been very much surprised to learn that they had, through the medium of Oblonsky, something in common. He was the fa.. | Leo Tolstoy | ||
| ee4d94f | Darya Alexandrovna, in a dressing jacket, and with her now scanty, once luxuriant and beautiful hair fastened up with hairpins on the nape of her neck, with a sunken, thin face and large, startled eyes, which looked prominent from the thinness of her face, was standing among a litter of all sorts of things scattered all over the room, before an open bureau, from which she was taking something. Hearing her husband's steps, she stopped, looki.. | Leo Tolstoy | ||
| 5deae44 | Higher and higher receded the sky, wider and wider spread the streak of dawn, whiter grew the pallid silver of the dew, more lifeless the sickle of the moon... | Leo Tolstoy | ||
| 43c900a | What right had I to imagine that she would wish to unite her life with mine? Who and What am I? A man of no account, wanted by no one and of no use to anyone. | Leo Tolstoy | ||
| 31224e6 | Some mathematician has said that enjoyment lies in the search for truth, not in the finding it. | Leo Tolstoy | ||
| 9be9341 | Jedna od najobicnijih i najrasirenijih praznovjerica je ta da svaki covjek ima jedino svoja odredena svojstva, da je covjek dobar, zao, glup, energican, apatican itd. Ljudi nisu takvi. Mozemo kazati o covjeku da je cesce dobar nego zao, cesce pametan nego glup, cesce energican nego apatican, i obratno; ali ce biti neistina ako reknemo o kojem covjeku da je dobar ili pametan, a o drugom da je zao ili glup. A mi uvijek tako dijelimo ljude. I .. | Tolstoy Leo Nikoleyevich | ||
| be7bdd4 | What is the law of nature? Is it to know that my security and that of my family, all my amusements and pleasures, are purchased at the expense of misery, deprivation, and suffering to thousands of human beings--by the terror of the gallows; by the misfortune of thousands stifling within prison walls; by the fear inspired by millions of soldiers and guardians of civilization, torn from their homes and besotted by discipline, to protect our p.. | Leo Tolstoy |