Quotes by Leo Tolstoy

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

“Its all Gods will: you can die in your sleep, and God can spare you in battle.”

“Everything I know, I know because of love.”

“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”

“In spite of death, he felt the need of life and love. He felt that love saved him from despair, and that this love, under the menace of despair, had become still stronger and purer. The one mystery of death, still unsolved, had scarcely passed before his eyes, when another mystery had arisen, as insoluble, urging him to love and to life.”

“And you know, theres less charm in life when you think about death--but its more peaceful.”

“So those are the direct answers human wisdom gives when it answers the question of life. The life of the body is evil and a lie. And therefore the destruction of this life of the body is something good, and we must desire it, says Socrates. Life is that which ought not be - an evil - and the going into nothingness is the sole good of life, says Schopenhauer. Everything in the world - folly and wisdom and riches and poverty and happiness and grief - all is vanity and nonsense. Man will die and nothing will remain. And that is foolish, says Solomon. One must not live with awareness of the inevitability of suffering, weakness, old age, and death - one must free oneself from life, from all possibility of life, says Buddha. And what these powerful intellects said was said and thought and felt by millions and millions of people like them. And I too thought and felt that.”

“I led the life of so many other so-called respectable people,—that is, in debauchery. And like the majority, while leading the life of a debauche, I was convinced that I was a man of irreproachable morality.”

“If there is a God and future life, there is truth and good, and mans highest happiness consists in striving to attain them. We must live, we must love, and we must believe that we live not only today on this scrap of earth, but have lived and shall live”

“I have lived through much, and now I think I have found what is needed for happiness. A quiet secluded life in the country, with the possibility of being useful to people to whom it is easy to do good, and who are not accustomed to have it done to them; then work which one hopes may be of some use; then rest, nature, books , music, love for ones neighbor - such is my idea of happiness. And then, on top of all that, you for a mate, and children, perhaps - what more can the heart of a man desire?”

“Where there has been true science, art has always been its exponent.”

“Everything ends in death, everything. Death is terrible.”

“He felt now that he was not simply close to her, but that he did not know where he ended and she began.”

“I wanted movement and not a calm course of existence. I wanted excitement and danger and the chance to sacrifice myself for my love.”

“But when, as is most often the case, the husband and wife accept the external obligation to live together all their lives and have, by the second month, come to loathe the sight of each other, want to get divorced and yet go on living together, it usually ends in that terrible hell that drives them to drink, makes them shoot themselves, kill and poison each other”