Leo Tolstoy > Quotes

“We imagine that when we are thrown out of our usual ruts all is lost, but it is only then that what is new and good begins. While there is life there is happiness. There is much, much before us.”
― Leo Tolstoy, War and Peace

“I felt that what I had been standing on had collapsed and that I had nothing left under my feet. What I had lived on no longer existed, and there was nothing left.

My life came to a standstill. I could breathe, eat, drink, and sleep, and I could not help doing these things; but there was no life, for there were no wishes the fulfillment of which I could consider reasonable. If I desired anything, I knew in advance that whether I satisfied my desire or not, nothing would come of it. Had a fairy come and offered to fulfil my desires I should not have know what to ask. If in moments of intoxication I felt something which, though not a wish, was a habit left by former wishes, in sober moments I knew this to be a delusion and that there was really nothing to wish for. I could not even wish to know the truth, for I guessed of what it consisted. The truth was that life is meaningless. I had as it were lived, lived, and walked, walked, till I had come to a precipice and saw clearly that there was nothing ahead of me but destruction. It was impossible to stop, impossible to go back, and impossible to close my eyes or avoid seeing that there was nothing ahead but suffering and real death--complete annihilation.”
― Leo Tolstoy, A Confession

“Love hinders death. Love is life. All, everything that I understand, I understand because I love. Everything is united by it alone. Love is God, and to die means that I, a particle of love, shall return to the general and eternal source." These thoughts seemed to him comforting. But they were only thoughts. Something was lacking in them, they were not clear, they were too one-sidedly personal and brain-spun. And there was the former agitation and obscurity.”
― Leo Tolstoy, War and Peace

“I did not myself know what I wanted: I feared life, desired to escape from it, yet still hoped something of it.”
― Leo Tolstoy, A Confession

“But that's the whole aim of civilization: to make everything a source of enjoyment.”
― Leo Tolstoy, Anna Karenina

“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 trifling.”
― Leo Tolstoy, Anna Karenina

“What is bad? What is good? What should one love, what hate? Why live, and what am I? What is lie,what is death? What power rules over everything?" he asked himself. And there was no answer to any of these questions except one, which was not logical and was not at all an answer to these questions. This answer was: "You will die--and everything will end. You will die and learn everything--or stop asking.”
― Leo Tolstoy, War and Peace

“All his life the example of a syllogism he had studied in Kiesewetter's logic - "Caius is a man, men are mortal, therefore Caius is mortal" - had seemed to him to be true only in relation to Caius the man, man in general, and it was quite justified , but he wasn't Caius and he wasn't man in general, and he had always been something quite, quite special apart from all other beings; he was Vanya, with Mama, with Papa, with Mitya and Volodya, with his toys and the coachman, with Nyanya, then with Katenka, with all the joys, sorrows, passions of childhood, boyhood, youth. Did Caius know the smell of the striped leather ball Vanya loved so much?: Did Caius kiss his mother's hand like that and did the silken folds of Caius's mother's dress rustle like that for him? Was Caius in love like that? Could Caius chair a session like that? And Caius is indeed mortal and it's right that he should die, but for me, Vanya, Ivan Ilych, with all my feelings and thoughts - for me it's quite different. And it cannot be that I should die. It would be too horrible.”
― Leo Tolstoy, The Death of Ivan Ilych

“God forgive me everything!’ she said, feeling the impossibility of struggling...”
― Leo Tolstoy, Anna Karenina

“But every acquisition that is disproportionate to the labor spent on it is dishonest.”
― Leo Tolstoy, Anna Karenina

“Everything ends in death, everything. Death is terrible.”
― Leo Tolstoy, War and Peace

“In order to understand, observe, deduce, man must first be conscious of himself as alive.”
― Leo Tolstoy, War and Peace

“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.”
― Leo Tolstoy, War and Peace

“Ah, if everyone was as sensitive as you! There's no girl who hasn't gone through that. And it's all so unimportant!”
― Leo Tolstoy, Anna Karenina

“History would be a wonderful thing – if it were only true.”
― Leo Tolstoy

“The only happy marriages I know are arranged ones.”
― Leo Tolstoy, Anna Karenina

“I can't praise a young lady who is alive only when people are admiring her, but as soon as she is left alone, collapses and finds nothing to her taste--one who is all for show and has no resources in herself”
― Leo Tolstoy, Семейное счастие

“The higher a man stands on the social ladder, the greater the number of people he is connected with, the more power he has over other people, the more obvious is the predestination and inevitability of his every action.”
― Leo Tolstoy, War and Peace

“انني لا آسف على شيء فقدته ، لأن مافقدت لا وجود له في رأيي واحساسي”
― ليو تولستوي

“I am not strange but I feel queer. I am like that sometimes. I feel like crying all the time. It is very silly but it will pass.”
― Leo Tolstoy, Anna Karenina

“Not in order to justify, but simply in order to explain my lack of consistency, I say: Look at my present life and then at my former life, and you will see that I do attempt to carry them out. It is true that I have not fulfilled one thousandth part of them [Christian precepts], and I am ashamed of this, but I have failed to fulfill them not because I did not wish to, but because I was unable to. Teach me how to escape from the net of temptations that surrounds me, help me and I will fulfill them; even without help I wish and hope to fulfill them.

Attack me, I do this myself, but attack me rather than the path I follow and which I point out to anyone who asks me where I think it lies. If I know the way home and am walking along it drunkenly, is it any less the right way because I am staggering from side to side! If it is not the right way, then show me another way; but if I stagger and lose the way, you must help me, you must keep me on the true path, just as I am ready to support you. Do not mislead me, do not be glad that I have got lost, do not shout out joyfully: “Look at him! He said he was going home, but there he is crawling into a bog!” No, do not gloat, but give me your help and support.”
― Leo Tolstoy

“Then we should find some artificial inoculation against love, as with smallpox. ”
― Leo Tolstoy, Anna Karenina

“لماذا تسقط التفاحة عندما تنضج؟ هل إن ثقلها يشدها إلى الأرض أم أن الشمس أذبلتها وهزتها الريح فأسقطتها؟ أم هل استجابت لنداء الغلام الذي نظر إليها فراقه منظرها واستهواها؟
إن السبب لا يكمن في كل ما ذكرناه.. إن التعليل الوحيد هو تفاعل في الأعضاء فنرى العالم النباتي يعزو السقوط إلى انهيار النسيج النووي بينما يعزوه الطفل إلى استجابة صلواته المتكرره لنيل التفاحة.. قديكون الاثنان على حق..”
― ليو تولستوي, War and Peace

“One of the first conditions of happiness is that the link between Man and Nature shall not be broken.”
― Leo Tolstoy

“When Levin thought what he was and what he was living for, he could find no answer to the questions and was reduced to despair; but when he left off questioning himself about it, it seemed as though he knew both what he was and what he was living for, acting and living resolutely and without hesitation.”
― Leo Tolstoy, Anna Karenina

“Each man lives for himself, uses his freedom to achieve his personal goals, and feels with his whole being that right now he can or cannot do such-and-such an action; but as soon as he does it, this action, committed at a certain moment in time, becomes irreversible, and makes itself the property of history, in which is has not a free but a predestined significance. ”
― Leo Tolstoy, War and Peace

“Just think! This whole world of ours is only a speck of mildew sprung up on a tiny planet, yet we think we can have something great - thoughts,, actions! They are all but grains of sand”
― Leo Tolstoy, Anna Karenina

“Tuhan tahu, tapi menunggu ..... ”
― Leo Tolstoy

“How often we sin, how much we deceive, and all for what?... All will end in death, all!”
― Leo Tolstoy, War and Peace

“It's different for you and me. You study, you become enlightened; I study, I become confused.”
― Leo Tolstoy, War and Peace