Leo Tolstoy, Война и мир Quotes

Happy people have no history.

Anna spoke not only naturally and intelligently, but intelligently and casually, without attaching any value to her own thoughts, yet giving great value to the thoughts of the one she was talking to.

Until you do what you believe in, you don't know whether you believe it or not.

Condemn me if you choose - I do that myself, - but condemn me, and not the path which I am following, and which I point out to those who ask me where, in my opinion, the path is.

Christianity in its true sense puts an end to the State. It was so understood from its very beginning, and for that Christ was crucified.

To love life is to love God. Harder and more blessed than all else is to love this life in one's sufferings, in undeserved sufferings.

A Christian cannot help being free, because in the pursuit and attainment of his object, no one can either hinder or retard him.

Physical violence is the basis of authority.

Nowhere nor in anything, except in the assertion of the Church, can we find that God or Christ founded anything like what churchmen understand by the Church.

The political is not compatible with the artistic, because the former, in order to prove, has to be one-sided.

When you say, 'I can’t do that,' you're expressing yourself incorrectly. You should say, 'I couldn’t do that before.'

Like all mad men, I thought everyone was mad except myself.

The soul is immortal- well then, if I shall always live, I must have lived before, lived for a whole eternity.

As soon as man applies his intelligence to any object at all, he unfailingly destroys the object.

Her face was brilliant and glowing; but this glow was not one of brightness; it suggested the fearful glow of a conflagration in the midst of a dark night.

Knowledge is real knowledge only when it is acquired by the efforts of your intellect, not by memory

Art is not a pleasure, a solace, or an amusement; art is great matter.

Without Greek studies there is no education.

People are always happy where there is love, because their happiness in in themselves.

Boredom is desire seeking desire.

There are many faiths, but the spirit is one.

Art begins when a man, with a purpose of communicating to other people a feeling he once experienced, calls it up again within himself and expresses it by certain external signs.

In order to know what he is, a man must first know what the sum of this mysterious humanity is, a humanity made up of people who, like himself, do not understand what they are.

With friends, one is well; but at home, one is better.

God knows, but He's waiting

The most important of all sciences man can and must learn is the science of living so as to do the least evil and the greatest possible good.

The military world is characterized by the absence of freedom - in other words, a rigorous discipline-enforced inactivity, ignorance, cruelty, debauchery and drunkenness.

The happiness of men consists in life. And life is in labor.

One must put oneself in every one's position. To understand everything is to forgive everything.

From the child of five to myself is but a step. But from the newborn baby to the child of five is an appalling distance.

With one hand I take thousands of rubles from the poor, and with the other I hand back a few kopecks.

There it is!' he thought with rapture. 'When I was already in despair, and when it seemed there would be no end- there it is! She loves me. She's confessed it.

But men are now united in states; that work is done; why now maintain exclusive devotion to one's own state, when this produces terrible evils for all.

In Varenka, she realized that one has but to forget oneself and love others, and one will be calm, happy, and noble.

Then he thought himself unhappy, but happiness was all in the future; now he felt that the best happiness was already in the past.

The march of humanity, springing as it does from an infinite multitude of individual wills, is continuous.

What time can be more beautiful when the one in which the finest virtues, innocent cheerfulness and indefinable longing for love constitute the sole motives of your life.

There was no solution, save that universal solution which life gives to all questions, even the most complex and insolvable: One must live in the needs of the day--that is, forget oneself.

I now understand that my welfare is only possible if I acknowledge my unity with all the people of the world without exception.

Where is there any book of the law so clear to each man as that written in his heart?

I often think how unfairly life's good fortune is sometimes distributed.

I'm getting old, that's the thing! What's in me now won't be there anymore.

A wife's a worry, a non-wife's even worse.

The question of how things will settle down is the only important question.

... it is the work and not the reward that is precious.

History would be an excellent thing if only it were true.

Whatever our fate is or may be, we have made it and do not complain of it." - Vronksy {Anna Karenina}

He who has a mistaken idea of life, will always have a mistaken idea of death.

He had the unlucky capacity many men have of seeing and believing in the possibility of goodness and truth, but of seeing the evil and falsehood of life too clearly to take any serious part in it.

Konstantin Levin did not like talking and hearing about the beauty of nature. Words for him took away the beauty of what he saw.