Leo Tolstoy, Война и мир Quotes
I wanted movement and not a calm course of existence. I wanted excitement and danger and the chance to sacrifice myself for my love.
A writer is dear and necessary for us only in the measure of which he reveals to us the inner workings of his very soul.
Doctoring her seemed to her as absurd as putting together the pieces of a broken vase. Her heart was broken. Why would they try to cure her with pills and powders?
Faith is the sense of life, that sense by virtue of which man does not destroy himself, but continues to live on. It is the force whereby we live.
The changes in our life must come from the impossibility to live otherwise than according to the demands of our conscience not from our mental resolution to try a new form of life.
Error is the force that welds men together; truth is communicated to men only by deeds of truth.
The law condemns and punishes only actions within certain definite and narrow limits; it thereby justifies, in a way, all similar actions that lie outside those limits.
Not all of life's roads are set fast, for a man may do this or a man may do that and not even the gods know the mind of a man.
And so the liberal tendency became a habit with Stepan Arkadyich, and he liked his newspaper, as he liked a cigar after dinner, for the slight haze it produced in his head.
We must not only cease our present desire for the growth of the state, but we must desire its decrease, its weakening.
For us, with the rule of right and wrong given us by Christ, there is nothing for which we have no standard. And there is no greatness where there is not simplicity, goodness, and truth.
Woman is generally so bad that the difference between a good and a bad woman scarcely exists.
Man lives consciously for himself, but is an unconscious instrument in the attainment of the historic, universal, aims of humanity.
Always the same. Now a spark of hope flashes up, then a sea of despair rages, and always pain; always pain, always despair, and always the same.
It's like scarlet fever: one has to get it over." "Then one should invent a way of inoculating love, like vaccination.
The Jew - is the symbol of eternity. ... He is the one who for so long had guarded the prophetic message and transmitted it to all mankind. A people such as this can never disappear.
We have become so accustomed to the religious lie that surrounds us that we do not notice the atrocity, stupidity and cruelty with which the teaching of the Christian church is permeated.
One can no more approach people without love than one can approach bees without care. Such is the quality of bees.
The magnanimity and sensibility of a lady who faints when she sees a calf being killed: she is so kindhearted that she can't look at blood, but enjoys eating the calf served up with sauce.
Art is a microscope which the artist fixes on the secrets of his soul, and shows to people these secrets which are common to all.
Before we can study the central issues of life today, we must destroy the prejudices and fallacies born of previous centuries.
If a man does not work at necessary and good things, then he will work at unnecessary and stupid things
It is terrible when people do not know God, but it is worse when people identify as God what is not God.
Woman is more impressionable than man. Therefore in the Golden Age they were better than men. Now they are worse.
To say that you can love one person all your life is just like saying that one candle will continue burning as long as you live.
Human science fragments everything in order to understand it, kills everything in order to examine it.
Happiness consists in always aspiring perfection, the pause in any level in perfection is the pause of happiness
Never did Christ utter a single word attesting to a personal resurrection and a life beyond the grave.
The business of art lies just in this, -- to make that understood and felt which, in the form of an argument, might be incomprehensible and inaccessible.
In order to understand, observe, deduce, man must first be conscious of himself as alive.
But every acquisition that is disproportionate to the labor spent on it is dishonest.
He looked at her as a man might look at a faded flower he had plucked, in which it was difficult for him to trace the beauty that had made him pick and so destroy it
Just as a painter needs light in order to put the finishing touches to his picture, so I need an inner light, which I feel I never have enough of in the autumn.
He stepped down, avoiding any long look at her as one avoids long looks at the sun, but seeing her as one sees the sun, without looking.
It's not given to people to judge what's right or wrong. People have eternally been mistaken and will be mistaken, and in nothing more than in what they consider right and wrong.
