Leo Tolstoy: Trending quotes (page 8)

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

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

“I'm like a starving man who has been given food. Maybe he's cold, and his clothes are torn, and he's ashamed, but he's not unhappy.”

“Man cannot possess anything as long as he fears death. But to him who does not fear it, everything belongs. If there was no suffering, man would not know his limits, would not know himself.”

“All the diversity, all the charm, and all the beauty of life are made up of light and shade.”

“She had no need to ask why he had come. She knew as certainly as if he had told her that he was here to be where she was.”

“Which is worse? the wolf who cries before eating the lamb or the wolf who does not.”

“Music is the shorthand of emotion”

“How can one be well… when one suffers morally?”

“Instead of going to Paris to attend lectures, go to the public library, and you won't come out for twenty years, if you really wish to learn.”

“Every heart has its own skeletons.”

“To tell the truth is very difficult, and young people are rarely capable of it.”

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

“It's all God's will: you can die in your sleep, and God can spare you in battle.”

“There are no conditions to which a person cannot grow accustomed, especially if he sees that everyone around him lives in the same way.”

“Everything depends on upbringing.”

“He stepped down, avoiding any long look at her as one avoids long looks at the sun, but seeing her as one sees the sun, without looking.”

“Happiness is an allegory, unhappiness a story.”

“I sit on a man's back, choking him, and making him carry me, and yet assure myself and others that I am very sorry for him and wish to ease his lot by any means possible, except getting off his back.”