Quotes by Leo Tolstoy

“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?”

“If everyone fought for their own convictions there would be no war.”

“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...”

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

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

“God is the same everywhere.”

“It can't be that life is so senseless and horrible. But if it really has been so horrible and senseless, why must I die and die in agony? There is something wrong!”

“In actuality, it was like the homes of all people who are not really rich but who want to look rich, and therefore end up looking like one another: it had damasks, ebony, plants, carpets, and bronz...”

“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...”

“A battle is won by the side that is absolutely determined to win. Why did we lose the battle of Austerlitz? Our casualties were about the same as those of the French, but we had told ourselves earl...”

“He remembered his mother's love for him, and his family's, and his friends', and the enemy's intention to kill him seemed impossible.”

“Millions of men, renouncing their human feelings and reason, had to go from west to east to slay their fellows, just as some centuries previously hordes of men had come from the east to the west sl...”

“Rostov kept thinking about that brilliant feat of his, which, to his surprise, had gained him the St. George Cross and even given him the reputation of a brave man - and there was something in it t...”

“It was necessary that millions of men in whose hands lay the real power -- the soldiers who fired, or transported provisions and guns -- should consent to carry out the will of these weak individua...”

“Davout looked up and gazed intently at him. For some seconds they looked at one another, and that look saved Pierre. Apart from conditions of war and law, that look established human relations betw...”

“What a terrible thing war is, what a terrible thing!”

“Life meanwhile, the actual life of men with their real interests of health and sickness, labour and rest, with their interests of thought, science, poetry, music, love, affection, hatred, passion, ...”

“Her maternal instinct told her Natasha had too much of something, and because of this she would not be happy”

“And once he had seen this, he could never again see it otherwise, just as we cannot reconstruct an illusion once it has been explained.”

“He is not apprehended by reason, but by life.”