Leo Tolstoy: Trending quotes (page 12)

“There was no answer, except the general answer life gives to all the most complex and insoluble questions. That answer is: one must live for the needs of the day, in other words, become oblivious. To become oblivious in dreams was impossible now, at least till night-time; it was impossible to return to that music sung by carafe-women; and so one had to become oblivious in the dreams of life.”

“Then we should find some artificial inoculation against love, as with smallpox.”

“God forgive me everything!’ she said, feeling the impossibility of struggling…”

“It's too easy to criticize a man when he's out of favour, and to make him shoulder the blame for everybody else's mistakes.”

“But every acquisition that is disproportionate to the labor spent on it is dishonest.”

“Though the doctors treated him, let his blood, and gave him medications to drink, he nevertheless recovered.”

“But that's the whole aim of civilization: to make everything a source of enjoyment.”

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

“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.”

“I can’t think of you and myself apart. You and I are the same to me”

“The only happy marriages I know are arranged ones.”

“And where love ends, hate begins”

“These joys were so trifling as to be as imperceptible as grains of gold among the sand, and in moments of depression she saw nothing but the sand; yet there were brighter moments when she felt nothing but joy, saw nothing but the gold.”

“People of limited intelligence are fond of talking about "these days," imagining that they have discovered and appraised the peculiarities of "these days" and that human nature changes with the times.”

“In order to understand, observe, deduce, man must first be conscious of himself as alive.”

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

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

“He sought his former accustomed fear of death and did not find it. "Where is it? What death?" There was no fear because there was no death.

In place of death there was light.”

“He knew she was there by the joy and fear that overwhelmed his heart.”