Quotes by Leo Tolstoy

In everything, almost in everything, I wrote I was guided by the need of collecting ideas which, linked together, would be the expression of myself, though each individual idea, expressed separately in words, loses its meaning, is horribly debased when only one of the links, of which it forms a part, is taken by itself. But the interlinking of these ideas is not, I think, an intellectual process, but something else, and it is impossible to express the source of this interlinking directly in words; it can only be done indirectly by describing images, actions, and situations in words.

If goodness has causes, it is not goodness; if it has effects, a reward, it is not goodness either. So goodness is outside the chain of cause and effect.

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.

Well, pray if you like, only youd do better to use your judgment.

To know God and to live is one and the same thing. God is life.

You are all misleading one another, and are yourselves deceived. The sun does not go round the earth, but the earth goes round the sun, revolving as it goes, and turning towards the sun in the course of each twenty-four hours, not only Japan, and the Philippines, and Sumatra where we now are, but Africa, and Europe, and America, and many lands besides. The sun does not shine for some one mountain, or for some one island, or for some one sea, nor even for one earth alone, but for other planets as well as our earth. If you would only look up at the heavens, instead of at the ground beneath your own feet, you might all understand this, and would then no longer suppose that the sun shines for you, or for your country alone.

It never before happened that the rich ruling and more educated minority, which has the most influence on the masses, not only disbelieved the existing religion but was convinced that no religion is no longer needed.

At the point where he, todays Ivan Ilyich, began to emerge, all the pleasures that had seemed so real melted away now before his eyes and turned into something trivial and often disgusting.And the further he was from childhood, the nearer he got to the present day, the more trivial and dubious his pleasures appeared. It started with law school. That had retained a little something that was really good: there was fun, there was friendship, there was hope. But in the last years the good times had become more exceptional. Then, at the beginning of his service with the governor, some good times came again: memories of making love to a woman. Then it became all confused, and the good times were not so many. After that there were fewer still; the further he went the fewer there were.Marriage. . .an accident and such a disappointment, and his wifes bad breath, and all that sensuality and hypocrisy! And the deadlines of his working life, and those money worries, going on for a year, two years, ten, twenty - always the same old story. And the longer it went on the deadlier it became.Its as if I had been going downhill when I thought I was going uphill. Thats how it was. In societys opinion I was heading uphill, but in equal measure life was slipping away from me...And now its all over. Nothing left but to die!

I feel even more incapable of returning to Russia the same as when I left it. Its just one more of those legends in Russia, confirmed by Passek, Sleptsov and others, that one only has to come to the Caucasus to be showered with decorations. Everyone expects it of us, demands it of us. But Ive been here two years, taken part in two expeditions and received nothing. For all that, Ive so much pride that I wont leave this place until Im a major, with an Anna or a Vladimir round my neck. Ive reached the point where it really rankles when some Gnilokishkin is decorated and Im not. Whats more, how could I look my elder in the face again, or merchant Kotelnikov to whom I sell grain, or my aunt in Moscow and all those fine gentlemen in Russia, if I return after two years in the Caucasus with nothing to show for it? No, I dont want to know those gentlemen and Im sure that they couldnt care less about me. But such is mans nature that though I couldnt give a damn about them theyre the reason why Im ruining the best years of my life, my happiness and whole future.

To educate the peasantry, three things are needed: schools, schools and schools.

We walked to meet each other up at the time of our love and then we have been irresistibly drifting in different directions, and theres no altering that.

In the best, the friendliest and simplest relations flattery or praise is necessary, just as grease is necessary to keep wheels turning.

They ought to find out how to vaccinate for love, like smallpox.

Between Countess Nordston and Levin there had been established those relations, not infrequent in society, in which two persons, while ostensibly remaining on friendly terms, are contemptuous of each other to such a degree that they cannot even treat each other seriously and cannot even insult each one another.

I had begun to feel that life was a repetition of the same thing; that there was nothing new either in me or in him; and that, on the contrary, we kept going back as it were on what was old.

Love them that hate you, but you cant love them whom you hate.

The strongest of all warriors are these two — Time and Patience.

I suffered most from the feeling that custom was daily petrifying our lives into one fixed shape, that our minds were losing their freedom and becoming enslaved to the steady passionless course of time.

Time is an illusion of life the life of the past and the future clouds men from the true life of the present.

Human science fragments everything in order to understand it, kills everything in order to examine it.