Leo Tolstoy, Война и мир Quotes

And once he had seen this, he could never again see it otherwise, just as we cannot reconstruct an illusion once it has been explained.

God gave the day, God gave the strength.

Ah, if everyone was as sensitive as you! There's no girl who hasn't gone through that. And it's all so unimportant!

Perhaps it's because I appreciate all I have so much that I don't worry about what I haven't got.

When ignorance does not know something, it says that what it does not know is stupid.

He who has love, is in God, and God is in him, for God is love.

To regard Christ as God, and to pray to him, are to my mind the greatest possible sacrilege.

I prefer a good pair of boots to Shakespeare.

Often a man goes on for years imaging that the religious teaching that had been imparted to him since childhood is still intact, while all the time there is not a trace of it left in him.

Man by violating his own feelings becomes cruel. And how deeply seated in the human heart is the injunction not to take life.

I did not myself know what I wanted: I feared life, desired to escape from it, yet still hoped something of it.

And so he who looks down at his feet will not know the truth, but he who discerns by the sun which way to go.

Every reform by violence is to be deprecated, because it does little to correct the evil while men remain as they are, and because wisdom has no need of violence.

The only happy marriages I know are arranged ones.

War is not a polite recreation but the vilest thing in life, and we ought to understand that and not play at war.

Go take the mother's soul, and learn three truths: Learn What dwells in man, What is not given to man , and What men live by . When thou hast learnt these things, thou shalt return to heaven.

Man has received direct from God only one instrument wherewith to know himself and to know his relation to the universe--he has no other--and that instrument is reason.

But the peasants - how do the peasants die?

India, which is the nursery of the great faiths of the world

I am sure that nothing has such a decisive influence upon a man's course as his personal appearance, and not so much his appearance as his belief in its attractiveness or unattractiveness.

If you love me as you say you do, make it so that I am at peace.

And you know, there's less charm in life when you think about death--but it's more peaceful.

Man cannot possess anything as long as he fears death. But to him who does not fear it, everything belongs. If there was no suffering, man would not know his limits, would not know himself.

Without the support from religion--remember, we talked about it--no father, using only his own resources, would be able to bring up a child.

One must be cunning and wicked in this world.

I think that when you remember, remember, remember everything like that, you could go on until you remember what was there before you were in the world.

Just when the question of how to live had become clearer to him, a new insoluble problem presented itself - Death.

Better to know a few things which are good and necessary than many things which are useless and mediocre

What is important is not the quantity of your knowledge but its quality. You can know many things without knowing the most important.

The true office of any faith is to give life a meaning which death cannot destroy.

Effort is not a means to lead us to happiness. Effort itself is happiness

There is no genius where there is not simplicity.

Mathematics is the queen of disciplines.... it will drive the nonsense out of your head!

There's a way out of every situation.

Eating meat is a leftover of the greatest brutality [killing]; the transition to vegetarianism is the first and most natural consequence of enlightenment.

I say that the God who created the world in six days and who sent His son, and also his son himself, are not God, but that God is the one existing, incomparable good, the beginning of everything.

Those whom God wishes to destroy he drives mad.

Our whole life is taken up with anxiety for personal security, with preparations for living, so that we really never live at all.

There is no significant idea which cannot be explained to an intelligent twelve year old boy in fifteen minutes.

In all human sorrow nothing gives comfort but love and faith, and that in the sight of Christ's compassion for us no sorrow is trifiling.

Either you are so underdeveloped that you can't see all that you can do, or you won't sacrifice your ease, your vanity, or whatever it is, to do it.

I must have physical exercise, or my temper'll certainly be ruined.

Wealth brings a heavy purse; poverty, a light spirit.

Men need only trust in Christ's teaching and obey it, and there will be peace on earth.

And for him, who lived in a certain circle, and who required some mental activity such as usually develops with maturity, having views was as necessary as having a hat.

I don’t count life as life without love

It's hard to love a woman and do anything.

Love those you hate you.

He was afraid of defiling the love which filled his soul.

I'm like a starving man who has been given food. Maybe he's cold, and his clothes are torn, and he's ashamed, but he's not unhappy.