Leo Tolstoy: Trending quotes

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Leo Tolstoy: 912 quotes64 likes

“We are all created to be miserable, and that we all know it, and all invent means of deceiving each other. And when one sees the truth, what is one to do?”

Leo Tolstoy book Anna Karenina

Source: Anna Karenina

“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 book War and Peace

Source: War and Peace

“I ask one thing only: I ask for the right to hope, to suffer as I do. But if even that cannot be, command me to disappear, and I disappear. You shall not see me if my presence is distasteful to you.”

Leo Tolstoy book Anna Karenina

Source: Anna Karenina

“the very fact of the death of someone close to them aroused in all who heard about it, as always, a feeling of delight that he had died and they hadn't.”

Source: The Death of Ivan Ilych

“He did what heroes do after their work is accomplished; he died.”

Leo Tolstoy book War and Peace

Source: War and Peace

“Life is too long to say anything definitely; always say perhaps.”

Leo Tolstoy book War and Peace

Source: War and Peace

“How often we sin, how much we deceive, and all for what?… All will end in death, all!”

Leo Tolstoy book War and Peace

Source: 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 book A Confession

Source: A Confession

“I think that to find out what love is really like, one must first make a mistake and then put it right.”

Leo Tolstoy book Anna Karenina

Source: Anna Karenina

“The example of a syllogism that he had studied in Kiesewetter's logic: Caius is a man, men are mortal, therefore Caius is mortal, had throughout his whole life seemed to him right only in relation to Caius, but not to him at all.”

Source: The Death of Ivan Ilych

“Smiling with pleasure, they went through their memories, not sad, old people's memories, but poetic, youthful ones, those impressions from the very distant past where dream merges with reality, and they laughed softly, rejoicing at something.”

Leo Tolstoy book War and Peace

Source: War and Peace

“excuse me' he added, taking the opera glasses out of her hands and looking over her bare shoulder at the row of boxes opposite, 'i'm afraid i'm becoming ridiculous”

Leo Tolstoy book Anna Karenina

Source: Anna Karenina

“It's like scarlet fever: one has to get it over."

"Then one should invent a way of inoculating love, like vaccination.”

Leo Tolstoy book Anna Karenina

Source: Anna Karenina

“Art begins when a man, with a purpose of communicating to other people a feeling he once experienced, calls it up again within himself and expresses it by certain external signs.”

“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.”

Leo Tolstoy book Anna Karenina

Source: Anna Karenina

“There was no solution, save that universal solution which life gives to all questions, even the most complex and insolvable: One must live in the needs of the day--that is, forget oneself.”

Leo Tolstoy book Anna Karenina

Source: Anna Karenina

“Progress consists, not in the increase of truth, but in freeing it from its wrappings. The truth is obtained like gold, not by letting it grow bigger, but by washing off from it everything that isn't gold.”

Tolstoy's Diaries (1985) edited and translated by R. F. Christian. London: Athlone Press, Vol 2, p. 512
Context: People usually think that progress consists in the increase of knowledge, in the improvement of life, but that isn't so. Progress consists only in the greater clarification of answers to the basic questions of life. The truth is always accessible to a man. It can't be otherwise, because a man's soul is a divine spark, the truth itself. It's only a matter of removing from this divine spark (the truth) everything that obscures it. Progress consists, not in the increase of truth, but in freeing it from its wrappings. The truth is obtained like gold, not by letting it grow bigger, but by washing off from it everything that isn't gold.

“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 book Family Happiness

Source: Family Happiness

“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 book Anna Karenina

Source: Anna Karenina

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

Leo Tolstoy book Anna Karenina

Source: Anna Karenina