Military life in general depraves men. It places them in conditions of complete idleness, that is, absence of all rational and useful work; frees them from their common human duties, which it replaces...
Love them that hate you, but you can't love those you hate.
Levin had often noticed in arguments between even the most intelligent people that after enormous efforts, an enormous number of logical subtleties and words, the arguers would finally come to the awa...
It's like scarlet fever: one has to get it over.Then one should invent a way of inoculating love, like vaccination.
It is better to know several basic rules of life than to study many unnecessary sciences. The major rules of life will stop you from evil and show you the good path in life; but the knowledge of many...
In the midst of winter, I find within me the invisible summer...
I wanted movement and not a calm course of existence. I wanted excitement and the chance to sacrifice myself for my love. I felt it in myself a superabundance of energy which found no outlet in our qu...
I often think how unfairly life's good fortune is sometimes distributed.
I have learned that men live not by selfishness, but by love.
I don't allow myself to doubt myself even for a moment.
I asked: 'What is the meaning of my life, beyond time, cause, and space?' And I replied to quite another question: 'What is the meaning of my life within time, cause, and space?' With the result that,...
Her maternal instinct told her Natasha had too much of something, and because of this she would not be happy
He suddenly felt that the very thing that had once been the source of his suffering had become the source of his spiritual joy, that what had seemed insoluble when he condemned, reproached and hated,...
He had learned that, as there is no situation in the world in which a man can be happy and perfectly free, so there is no situation in which he can be perfectly unhappy and unfree.
He had committed no evil action, but, what was far worse than an evil action, he had entertained evil thoughts, whence evil actions proceed. An evil action may not be repeated, and can be repented of;...
Every man who knows to the minutest details all the complexity of the conditions surrounding him, cannot help imagining that the complexity of these conditions, and the difficulty of making them clear...
Each man lives for himself, uses his freedom to achieve his personal goals, and feels with his whole being that right now he can or cannot do such-and-such an action; but as soon as he does it, this a...
Count Lev Nikolayevich Tolstoy, commonly referred to in English as Leo Tolstoy, was a Russian novelist, writer, essayist, philosopher, Christian anarchist, pacifist, educational reformer, moral thinke...
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 wi...
-Why are you so sad? - Because you speak to me in words and I look at you with feelings.