Leo Tolstoy Quotes

Just think! This whole world of ours is only a speck of mildew sprung up on a tiny planet, yet we think we can have something great - thoughts,, actions! They are all but grains of sand

Leo Tolstoy

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

Leo Tolstoy

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 true

Leo Tolstoy

I felt a wish never to leave that room - a wish that dawn might never come, that my present frame of mind might never change.

Leo Tolstoy

But every acquisition that is disproportionate to the labor spent on it is dishonest.

Leo Tolstoy

it's much better to do good in a way that no one knows anything about it.

Leo Tolstoy

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 it

Leo Tolstoy

But that's the whole aim of civilization: to make everything a source of enjoyment.

Leo Tolstoy

In everything, almost in everything, I wrote I was guided by the need of collecting ideas which, linked together, would be the expression of myself, though each individual idea, expressed separately in words, loses its meaning, is horribly debased when only one of the links, of which it forms a part, is taken by itself. But the interlinking of these ideas is not, I think, an intellectual process, but something else, and it is impossible to express the source of this interlinking directly in words; it can only be done indirectly by describing images, actions, and situations in words.

Leo Tolstoy

The acquisition by dishonest means and cunning,' said Levin, feeling that he was incapable of clearly defining the borderline between honesty and dishonesty. 'Like the profits made by banks,' he went on. 'This is evil, I mean, the acquisition of enormous fortunes without work, as it used to be with the spirit monopolists. Only the form has changed. Hardly were the monopolies abolished before railways and banks appeared: just another way of making money without work.

Leo Tolstoy