Quotes by Leo Tolstoy

“How good is it to remember one's insignificance: that of a man among billions of men, of an animal amid billions of animals; and one's abode, the earth, a little grain of sand in comparison with Si...”

“War is not a polite recreation but the vilest thing in life, and we ought to understand that and not play at war. Our attitude towards the fearful necessity of war ought to be stern. It boils down ...”

“To us, it is incomprehensible that millions of Christian men killed and tortured each other because Napoleon was ambitious or Alexander was firm, or because England's policy was astute or the Duke ...”

“Those are the men,' added Bolkonsky with a sigh which he could not suppress, as they went out of the palace, 'those are the men who decide the fate of nations.”

“But to us of a later generation...it is inconceivable that millions of Christian men should have killed and tortured each other, because Napoleon was ambitious, Alexander firm, English policy craft...”

“But all these hints at foreseeing what actually did happen on the French as well as on the Russian side are only conspicuous now because the event has justified them. If the event had not come to p...”

“All his life the example of a syllogism he had studied in Kiesewetter's logic - "Caius is a man, men are mortal, therefore Caius is mortal" - had seemed to him to be true only in relation to Caius ...”

“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,...”

“It's as if I had been going downhill when I thought I was going uphill. That's how it was. In society's opinion I was heading uphill, but in equal measure life was slipping away from me... And now ...”

“But when, as is most often the case, the husband and wife accept the external obligation to live together all their lives and have, by the second month, come to loathe the sight of each other, want...”

“Can it be that there is not enough space for man in this beautiful world, under those immeasurable, starry heavens? Is it possible that man's heart can harbour, amid such ravishing natural beauty, ...”

“...And there really are men who believe in this, who spend their time in promoting Leagues of Peace, in delivering addresses, and in writing books; and of course the governments sympathize with it ...”

“To destroy the life that dwells in othersis beyond your power. The life of those you have slainhas vanished from your eyes, but is not destroyed. Youthought to lengthen your own life and to shorten...”

“Dumnezeu este doar unul i acelai pretutindeni.”

“How can it be that Ive never seen that lofty sky before? Oh, how happy I am to have found it at last. Yes! Its all vanity, its all an illusion, everything except that infinite sky. There is nothing...”

“Our life has been joined, not by man, but by God. That union can only be severed by a crime, and a crime of that nature brings its own chastisement.”

“It is amazing how complete is the delusion that beauty is goodness.”

“We can know only that we know nothing. And that is the highest degree of human wisdom.”

“People of limited intelligence are fond of talking about "these days," imagining that they have discovered and appraised the peculiarities of "these days" and that human nature changes with the times.”

“truth, like gold, is to be obtained not by its growth, but by washing away from it all that is not gold.”