1
I think... if it is true that there are as many minds as there are heads, then there are as many kinds of love as there are hearts.Leo Tolstoy
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Respect was invented to cover the empty place where love should be.Leo Tolstoy
3
Love. The reason I dislike that word is that it means too much for me, far more than you can understand."- Anna Karenina {Anna Karenina}Leo Tolstoy
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I've always loved you, and when you love someone, you love the whole person, just as he or she is, and not as you would like them to be.Leo Tolstoy
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They've got no idea what happiness is, they don't know that without this love there is no happiness or unhappiness for us--there is no life.Leo Tolstoy
6
If you love me as you say you do, ' she whispered, 'make it so that I am at peace.Leo Tolstoy
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It's hard to love a woman and do anything.Leo Tolstoy
8
Love those you hate you.Leo Tolstoy
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He was afraid of defiling the love which filled his soul.Leo Tolstoy
10
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.Leo Tolstoy
11
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 itLeo Tolstoy
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There are no conditions to which a person cannot grow accustomed, especially if he sees that everyone around him lives in the same way.Leo Tolstoy
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And you know, there's less charm in life when you think about death--but it's more peaceful.Leo Tolstoy
14
Without knowledge of what I am and why I am here, it is impossible to live, and since I cannot know that, I cannot live either. In an infinity of time, in an infinity of matter, and an infinity of space a bubble-organism emerges while will exist for a little time and then burst, and that bubble am I.Leo Tolstoy
15
And where love ends, hate beginsLeo Tolstoy
16
Then he thought himself unhappy, but happiness was all in the future; now he felt that the best happiness was already in the past.Leo Tolstoy
17
Vronsky saw nothing and no one. He felt himself as a king, not because she had made an impression on Anna-he did not yet believe that-but because the impression she had made on him gave him happiness and pride.Leo Tolstoy
18
Toate familiile fericite se aseamănă între ele. Fiecare familie nefericită este nefericită în felul ei.Leo Tolstoy
19
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.Leo Tolstoy
20
God forgive me everything! ’ she said, feeling the impossibility of struggling...Leo Tolstoy
21
A little muzhik was working on the railroad, mumbling in his beard. And the candle by which she had read the book that was filled with fears, with deceptions, with anguish, and with evil, flared up with greater brightness than she had ever known, revealing to her all that before was in darkness, then flickered, grew faint, and went out forever.Leo Tolstoy
22
The more mental effort he made the clearer he saw that it was undoubtedly so: that he had really forgotten and overlooked one little circumstance in life - that Death would come and end everything, so that it was useless to begin anything, and that there was no help for it, Yes it was terrible but trueLeo Tolstoy
23
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.Leo Tolstoy
24
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
25
To educate the peasantry, three things are needed: schools, schools and schools.Leo Tolstoy
26
We walked to meet each other up at the time of our love and then we have been irresistibly drifting in different directions, and there's no altering that.Leo Tolstoy
27
They ought to find out how to vaccinate for love, like smallpox.Leo Tolstoy
28
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.Leo Tolstoy
29
Love them that hate you, but you can't love them whom you hate.Leo Tolstoy
30
But in the depths of his heart, the older he became, and the more intimately he knew his brother, the more and more frequently the thought struck him that this faculty of working for the public good, of which he felt himself utterly devoid, was possibly not so much a quality as a lack of something --not a lack of good, honest, noble desires and tastes, but a lack of vital force, of what is called heart, of that impulse which drives a man to choose someone out of the innumerable paths of life, and to care only for that one. The better he knew his brother, the more he noticed that Sergey Ivanovitch, and many other people who worked for the public welfare, were not led by an impulse of the heart to care for the public good, but reasoned from intellectual considerations that it was a right thing to take interest in public affairs, and consequently took interest in them. Levin was confirmed in this generalization by observing that his brother did not take questions affecting the public welfare or the question of the immortality of the soul a bit more to heart than he did chess problems, or the ingenious construction of a new machine.Leo Tolstoy
31
If there was a reason why he preferred the liberal tendency to the conservative one (also held to by many of his circle), it was not because he found the liberal tendency more sensible, but it more closely suited his manner of life.Leo Tolstoy
32
He felt that he could not turn aside from himself the hatred of men, because that hatred did not come from his being bad (in that case he could have tried to be better), but from his being shamefully and repulsively unhappy. He knew that for this, for the very fact that his heart was torn with grief, they would be merciless to him. He felt that men would crush him as dogs strangle a torn dog yelping with pain. He knew that his sole means of security against people was to hide his wounds from them.Leo Tolstoy
33
All the diversity, all the charm, and all the beauty of life are made up of light and shade.Leo Tolstoy
34
Rummaging in our souls, we often dig up something that ought to have lain there unnoticed.Leo Tolstoy
35
Though the children did not know Levin well and did not remember when they had last seen him, they did not feel towards him any of that strange shyness and antagonism so often felt by children towards grown-up people who 'pretend, ' which causes them to suffer as painfully. Pretence about anything sometimes deceives the wisest and shrewdest man, but, however cunningly it is hidden, a child of the meanest capacity feels it and is repelled by it.Leo Tolstoy
36
But every acquisition that is disproportionate to the labor spent on it is dishonest.Leo Tolstoy
37
Just fancy! One can hear and see the grass growing, ' thought Levin, as he noticed wet slate-coloured aspen leaf move close to the point of a blade of grass.Leo Tolstoy
38
And as a sign that everything was now all right in the world, she opened her mouth a fraction, and after arranging her sticky lips better around her old teeth, smacked them and settled down into a state of blissful rest. Levin watched these last movements of hers closely. ‘I’m just the same! ’ he said to himself; ‘Just the same! Never mind... All is well.Leo Tolstoy
39
Many families remain for years in the same place, though both husband and wife are sick of it, simply because there is neither complete division nor agreement between them.Leo Tolstoy
40
He had never thought the question over clearly, but vaguely imagined that his wife had long suspected him of being unfaithful to her and was looking the other way. It even seemed to him that she, a worn-out, aged, no longer beautiful woman, not remarkable for anything, simple, merely a kind mother of a family, ought in all fairness to be indulgent. It turned out to be quite the opposite.Leo Tolstoy
41
Yes, there is something in me hateful, repulsive, " thought Ljewin, as he came away from the Schtscherbazkijs', and walked in the direction of his brother's lodgings. "And I don't get on with other people. Pride, they say. No, I have no pride. If I had any pride, I should not have put myself in such a position".Leo Tolstoy
42
Doctoring her seemed to her as absurd as putting together the pieces of a broken vase. Her heart was broken. Why would they try to cure her with pills and powders?Leo Tolstoy
43
Are we not all flung into the world for no other purpose than to hate each other, and so to torture ourselves and one another?Leo Tolstoy
44
Yet that grief and this joy were alike outside all the ordinary conditions of life; they were loop-holes, as it were, in that ordinary life through which there came glimpses of something sublime. And in the contemplation of this sublime something the soul was exalted to inconceivable heights of which it had before had no conception which reason lagged behind, unable to keep up with it.Leo Tolstoy
45
...those children were already beginning to repay her care by affording her small joys. 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 sand; yet there were brighter moments when she felt nothing but joy, saw nothing but the gold.Leo Tolstoy
46
Hypocrisy in anything whatever may deceive the cleverest and most penetrating man, but the least wide-awake of children recognizes it, and is revolted by it, however ingeniously it may be disguised.Leo Tolstoy
47
Peaceful with six children Darya Alexandrova could not be.. Rare indeed were the brief periods of peace..hard though it was for the mother to bear the dread of illness, the illnesses themselves, and the grief of seeing signs of evil propensities in her children--the children themselves were even now repaying her in small joys for her sufferings. Those joys were so small that they passed unnoticed, like gold in sand, and at bad moments she could see nothing but the pain, nothing but sand; but there were good moments too when she saw nothing but the joy, nothing but gold. Now in the solitude of the country, she began to be more and more frequently aware of those joys. Often, looking at them, she would make every possible effort to persuade herself that she was mistaken, that she as a mother was partial to her children. All the same, she could not help saying to herself that she had charming children, all six of them in different ways, but a set of children such as is not often to be met with, and she was happy in them, and proud of them.Leo Tolstoy
48
Darkness had fallen upon everything for him; but just because of this darkness he felt that the one guiding clue in the darkness was his work, and he clutched it and clung to it with all his strength.Leo Tolstoy
49
Whatever our destiny is or may be, we have made it ourselves, and we do not complain of it.Leo Tolstoy
50
Maybe its because i rejoice over what i have and don't grieve over what i don't have".Leo Tolstoy