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.
Respect was invented to cover the empty place where love should be.
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}
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.
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.
If you love me as you say you do,’ she whispered, ‘make it so that I am at peace.
The whole world is divided for me into two parts: one is she, and there is all happiness, hope, light; the other is where she is not, and there is dejection and darkness…
You can love a person dear to you with a human love, but an enemy can only be loved with divine love.
He was afraid of defiling the love which filled his soul.
He felt now that he was not simply close to her, but that he did not know where he ended and she began.
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.
I wanted movement and not a calm course of existence. I wanted excitement and danger and the chance to sacrifice myself for my love.
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
If, then, I were asked for the most important advice I could give, that which I considered to be the most useful to the men of our century, I should simply say: in the name of God, stop a moment, cease your work, look around you.
In the name of God, stop a moment, cease your work, look around you.
Pierre was right when he said that one must believe in the possibility of happiness in order to be happy, and I now believe in it. Let the dead bury the dead, but while I’m alive, I must live and be happy.
If we admit that human life can be ruled by reason, then all possibility of life is destroyed.
The best stories don’t come from “good vs. bad” but “good vs. good.
There are no conditions to which a person cannot grow accustomed, especially if he sees that everyone around him lives in the same way.
And you know, there’s less charm in life when you think about death–but it’s more peaceful.
Only people who are capable of loving strongly can also suffer great sorrow, but this same necessity of loving serves to counteract their grief and heals them.
Seize the moments of happiness, love and be loved! That is the only reality in the world, all else is folly. It is the one thing we are interested in here.
Man cannot possess anything as long as he fears death. But to him who does not fear it, everything belongs. If there was no suffering, man would not know his limits, would not know himself.
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 quiet life.
…suffering and freedom have their limits…those limits are very near together.
Wrong does not cease to be wrong because the majority share in it.
There is no greatness where there is not simplicity, goodness, and truth.
To tell the truth is very difficult, and young people are rarely capable of it.
Every man had his personal habits, passions, and impulses toward goodness, beauty, and truth.
Loving the same man or woman all your life, why, that’s like supposing the same candle could last you all your life
If only [people] understood that every thought is both false and true! False by one-sidenedness resulting from man’s inability to embrace the whole truth, and true as an expression of one fact of human endeavor.
Este incredibil cât de completă este iluzia care ne face să credem că frumuseţea este în genere bunătate.
It’s all God’s will: you can die in your sleep, and God can spare you in battle.
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.
I led the life of so many other so-called respectable people,—that is, in debauchery. And like the majority, while leading the life of a debauche, I was convinced that I was a man of irreproachable morality.
Happiness consists in always aspiring perfection, the pause in any level in perfection is the pause of happiness
Then he thought himself unhappy, but happiness was all in the future; now he felt that the best happiness was already in the past.
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.
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.
Toate familiile fericite se aseamănă între ele. Fiecare familie nefericită este nefericită în felul ei.
Seize the moments of happiness, Love and be Loved!That is the only reality in the world, all else is folly!
In the midst of winter, I find within me the invisible summer…
Everything ends in death, everything. Death is terrible.
God forgive me everything!’ she said, feeling the impossibility of struggling…
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!
There are many faiths, but the spirit is one — in me, and in you, and in him. So that if everyone believes himself, all will be united; everyone be himself and all will be as one.
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.
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.
Well, pray if you like, only you’d do better to use your judgment.
To know God and to live is one and the same thing. God is life.
It never before happened that the rich ruling and more educated minority, which has the most influence on the masses, not only disbelieved the existing religion but was convinced that no religion is no longer needed.
To educate the peasantry, three things are needed: schools, schools and schools.
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.
In the best, the friendliest and simplest relations flattery or praise is necessary, just as grease is necessary to keep wheels turning.
They ought to find out how to vaccinate for love, like smallpox.
I had begun to feel that life was a repetition of the same thing; that there was nothing new either in me or in him; and that, on the contrary, we kept going back as it were on what was old.
Love them that hate you, but you can’t love them whom you hate.
The strongest of all warriors are these two — Time and Patience.
I suffered most from the feeling that custom was daily petrifying our lives into one fixed shape, that our minds were losing their freedom and becoming enslaved to the steady passionless course of time.
Time is an illusion of life the life of the past and the future clouds men from the true life of the present.
Human science fragments everything in order to understand it, kills everything in order to examine it.
Where there has been true science, art has always been its exponent.
There lay between them, separating them, that same terrible line of the unknown and of fear, like the line separating the living from the dead.
Let fear once get possession of the soul, and it does not readily yield its place to another sentiment.Sebastopol by Leo Tolstoy
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.
If everyone fought for their own convictions there would be no war.
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 slaying their fellows.
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 individuals…
What a terrible thing war is, what a terrible thing!
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.
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.
You say: I am not free. But I have raised and lowered my arm. Everyone understands that this illogical answer is an irrefutable proof of freedom.
I’m not a goose, you’re the gooses for crying over nothing
Natasha, in her lilac silk dress trimmed with black lace walked, as women can walk, with the more repose and stateliness the greater the pain and shame in her soul.
Everyone thinks of changing the world, but no one thinks of changing himself.
All the diversity, all the charm, and all the beauty of life are made up of light and shade.
You think that your laws correct evil – they only increase it. There is but one way to end evil – by rendering good for evil to all men without distinction.
Rummaging in our souls, we often dig up something that ought to have lain there unnoticed.
Whatever we may say about the soul going to the sky… we know there is no sky but only an atmosphere.
A writer is dear and necessary for us only in the measure of which he reveals to us the inner workings of his very soul.
I felt how much better and more dignified it was for me to show off the finer side of my soul than of my body.
The business of art lies just in this, — to make that understood and felt which, in the form of an argument, might be incomprehensible and inaccessible.
This history of culture will explain to us the motives, the conditions of life, and the thought of the writer or reformer.
The subject of history is the life of peoples and mankind.
In the legal respect, after the execution of the supposed incendiaries, the other half of Moscow burned down.
In order to understand, observe, deduce, man must first be conscious of himself as alive.
A man’s every action is inevitably conditioned by what surrounds him and by his own body.
Man lives consciously for himself, but serves as an unconscious instrument for the achievement of historical, universally human goals.
We are all brothers, and yet I live by receiving a salary for arraigning, judging and punishing a thief or a prostitute, whose existence is conditioned by the whole consumption of my life.
But every acquisition that is disproportionate to the labor spent on it is dishonest.
One can no more approach people without love than one can approach bees without care. Such is the quality of bees…
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.
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.
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?
The true meaning of Christ’s teaching consists in the recognition of love as the supreme law of life, and therefore not admitting any exceptions.
It was as if the main screw in his head, which held his whole life together, had become stripped. The screw would not go in, would not come out, but turned in the same groove without catching hold, and it was impossible to stop turning it.
The higher a man stands on the social ladder, the greater the number of people he is connected with, the more power he has over other people, the more obvious is the predestination and inevitability of his every action.
Power is the sum total of the wills of the mass, transfered by express or tactic agreement to rulers chosen by the masses.
Power is a word the meaning of which we do not understand.
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?
I think that when you remember, remember, remember everything like that, you could go on until you remember what was there before you were in the world.
Society in itself is no great harm, but unsatisfied social aspirations are a bad and ugly business. We must certainly accept, and we will.
Pure and complete sorrow is as impossible as pure and complete joy.
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.
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.
The worker picked up Pakhom’s spade, dug a grave, and buried him – six feet from head to heel, exactly the amount of land a man needs.
Whatever our destiny is or may be, we have made it ourselves, and we do not complain of it.
You need feeling, emotion, to create. You can’t create out of indifference.
I do not live when I loose belief in the existence of God. I should long ago have killed myself had I not had a dim hope of finding Him. I live really live only when I feel him and seek Him
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.
Maybe its because i rejoice over what i have and don’t grieve over what i don’t have”.
Spring, love, happiness! Are you not weary of that stupid, meaningless, constantly repeated fraud? Always the same and always a fraud! There is no spring, no sun, no happiness!
It was only at her prayers that she felt able to think calmly and clearly either of Prince Andrey or Anatole, with a sense that her feelings for them were as nothing compared with her feel of worship and awe of God.
Just as a painter needs light in order to put the finishing touches to his picture, so I need an inner light, which I feel I never have enough of in the autumn.
Deliberately she shrouded the light in her eyes, but it shone against her will in the faintly perceptible smile.
In order to forgive, one must have lived through what I have lived through, and may God spare her that.
The very nastiest and coarsest, I can’t tell you. It is not grief, not dullness, but much worse. It is as if all that was good in me had hidden itself, and only what is horrid remains.
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
One’s writing is good only when the intelligence and the imagination are in equilibrium. As soon as one of them overbalances the other, it’s all up; you may as well throw it away and begin afresh.
With friends, one is well; but at home, one is better.
I often think that men don’t understand what is noble and what is ignorant, though they always talk about it.
If so many men, so many minds, certainly so many hearts, so many kinds of love.
Man survives earthquakes, epidemics, the horrors of disease, and agonies of the soul, but all the time his most tormenting tragedy has been, is, and will always be, the tragedy of the bedroom.
Men never understand what honor is, though they’re always talking about it
Men always did and always will err and nothing more than in what they consider right and wrong.
But she was not even grateful to him for it; nothing good on Pierre’s part seemed to her to be an effort, it seemed so natural for him to be kind to everyone that there was no merit in his kindness.
Wealth and power and life, all that men build up and guard with such effort, is only worth anything through the joy with which it can all be cast away.
The terrible thing is that it’s impossible to tear the past out by the roots.
Because of the self-confidence with which he had spoken, no one could tell whether what he said was very clever or very stupid.
I think the motive force of all our action is, after all, personal happiness.
Is it really possible to tell someone else what one feels?
Love them that hate you, but you can’t love those you hate.
A man can live and be healthy without killing animals for food; therefore, if he eats meat, he participates in taking animal life merely for the sake of his appetite. And to act so is immoral.
When loving with human love one may pass from love to hatred, but divine love cannot change.
All that day she felt as if she were acting in a theatre with better actors than herself, and that her bad performance was spoiling the whole affair.
Questions about her feelings, about what has been or might be going on in her soul are non of my business; they are the business of her conscience and belong to religion.
She had no need to ask why he had come. She knew as certainly as if he had told her that he was here to be where she was.
It is pride that makes error and discord among men.
Ah, if everyone was as sensitive as you! There’s no girl who hasn’t gone through that. And it’s all so unimportant!
All the horrors of the reign of terror were based on concern for public tranquility.
Woman, don’t you know, is such a subject that however much you study it, it’s always perfectly new.
it’s much better to do good in a way that no one knows anything about it.
And the candle by the light of which she had been reading that book filled with anxieties, deceptions, grief and evil, flared up brighter than ever, lit up for her all that had once been darkness, sputtered, grew dim and went out for ever.
Man lives consciously for himself but unconsciously he serves as an instrument for the accomplishment of historical and social ends.
Man is created for happiness, that happiness lies in himself, in the satisfaction of simple human needs; and that all unhappiness is due, not to privation but to superfluity.
Respect is an invention of people who want to cover up the empty place where love should be.
And not only the pride of intellect, but the stupidity of intellect. And, above all, the dishonesty, yes, the dishonesty of intellect. Yes, indeed, the dishonesty and trickery of intellect.
He stepped down, trying not to look long at her, as if she were the sun, yet he saw her, like the sun, even without looking.
what time can be more beautiful than the one in which the finest virtues, innocent cheerfulness and indefinable longing for love constitute the sole motives of your life?
What better time is there in our lives than when the two best of virtues-innocent gaiety and a boundless yearning for affection-are our sole objects of pursuit?
He was in a fairy kingdom where everything was possible.He looked up at the sky. And the sky was a fairy realm like the earth. It was clearing, and over the tops of the trees clouds were swiftly sailing as if unveiling the stars.
everything comes in time to him who knows how to wait . . . there is nothing stronger than these two: patience and time, they will do it all.
Patience is waiting. Not passively waiting. That is laziness. But to keep going when the going is hard and slow – that is patience. The two most powerful warriors are patience and time.
oh God! what am I to do if I love nothing but fame and men’s esteem?
But perhaps it is always so, that men form their conceptions from fictitious, conventional types, and then—all the combinations made—they are tired of the fictitious figures and begin to invent more natural, true figures.
I assure you that I sleep anywhere, and always like a dormouse.
It hurt her to stir up these feelings, but yet she knew that that was the best part of her soul, and that that part of her soul would quickly be smothered in the life she was leading.
She did not want to talk of her sorrow, but with that sorrow in her heart she could not talk of outside matters.
If a man aspires to a righteous life, his first act of abstinence if from injury to animals.
I … having filled my life with the spiritual blessings Christianity gave me, brimful of these blessings and living by them, I, like a child, not understanding them, destroy them — that is, I wish to destroy that by which I live.
How strange it was to think that he, who such a short time ago dared not believe in the happiness of her loving him, now felt unhappy because she loved him too much!
While I doubted, I had hope; but now there is no hope left and all the same I doubt everything.
One may deal with things without love…but you cannot deal with men without it…It cannot be otherwise, because natural love is the fundamental law of human life.
Love does not exist. There exists the physical need for intercourse, and the rational need for a mate in life.
All the variety, all the charm, all the beauty of life is made up of light and shadow.
What am I coming for?” he repeated, looking straight into her eyes. “You know that I have come to be where you are,” he said; “I can’t help it.
Friends we shall never be, you know that yourself. Whether we shall be the happiest or the wretchedest of people–that’s in your hands.
At moments of departure and a change of life, people capable of reflecting on their actions usually get into a serious state of mind. At these moments they usually take stock of the past and make plans for the future.
If you look for perfection, you’ll never be content.
The antagonism between life and conscience may be removed in two ways: by a change of life or by a change of conscience.
With no doubt Al Hussain was one of the greatest rebels, for correcting the path of rulers who deviated from the right path. He, by his stance honorably acquired martyrdom martyrdom that free people wish to acquire.
It’s too easy to criticize a man when he’s out of favour, and to make him shoulder the blame for everybody else’s mistakes.
And those who only know the non-platonic love have no need to talk of tragedy. In such love there can be no sort of tragedy.
That one must either explain life to oneself so that it does not seem to be an evil mockery by some sort of devil, or one must shoot oneself.
the same question arose in every soul: “For what, for whom, must I kill and be killed?”… p982
The coffee was never served. It boiled over, spattered them all, and wet a costly tablecloth and the baroness’s dress. But it served the end that was desired for it gave rise to many jests and merry peals of laughter.
I consider jealousy a humiliating and degrading feeling, and I shall never allow myself to be influenced by it.
He was nine years old; he was a child; he he knew his own soul, it was precious to him, he guarded it as the eyelid guards the eye, and without the key of love he let no one into his soul.
He never chooses an opinion, he just wears whatever happens to be in style.
There will be today, there will be tomorrow, there will be always, and there was yesterday, and there was the day before…
It’s not given to people to judge what’s right or wrong. People have eternally been mistaken and will be mistaken, and in nothing more than in what they consider right and wrong.
He stepped down, avoiding any long look at her as one avoids long looks at the sun, but seeing her as one sees the sun, without looking.
But that’s the whole aim of civilization: to make everything a source of enjoyment.
Just when the question of how to live had become clearer to him, a new insoluble problem presented itself – Death.
Though the doctors treated him, let his blood, and gave him medications to drink, he nevertheless recovered.
Perhaps it’s because I appreciate all I have so much that I don’t worry about what I haven’t got.
The very same thing, don’t you see, may be looked at tragically, and turned into a misery, or it may be looked at simply and even humorously. Possibly you are inclined to look at things too tragically.
A man on a thousand mile walk has to forget his goal and say to himself every morning, ‘Today I’m going to cover twenty-five miles and then rest up and sleep.
They were dealt with as in war, and they naturally employed the means that were used against them.
Read the best books first, otherwise you’ll find you do not have time. – Henry David Thoreau
What is reason given me for, if I am not to use it to avoid bringing unhappy beings into the world!
My field was God’s earth. Wherever I ploughed, there was my field. Land was free. It was a thing no man called his own. Labor was the only thing men called their own.
he was one of those diplomats who like and know how to work, and, despite his laziness, he occasionally spent nights at his desk.
He disliked contradiction, and still more, arguments that were continually skipping from one thing to another, introducing new and disconnected points, so that there was no knowing to which to reply.
Everyone had something disparaging to say about the unfortunate Maltyshcheva, and the conversation began crackling merrily like a kindling bonfire.
There are no conditions to which a man cannot become used, especially if he sees that all around him are living in the same way.
There are no conditions to which a man cannot become accustomed.
Art is a human activity consisting in this that one man consciously by means of external signs hands on to others feelings he has worked through and other people are infected by these feelings and also experience them.
It is amazing how complete is the delusion that beauty is goodness.
Christianity with its doctrine of humility of forgiveness of love is incompatible with the state with its haughtiness its violence its punishment its wars.
Everybody thinks of changing humanity and nobody thinks of changing himself.
The strongest of all warriors are these two-Time and Patience.
Happiness does not depend on outward things but on the way we see them.
To love one’s neighbors to love one’s enemies to love everything – to love God in all His manifestations – human love serves to love those dear to us but to love one’s enemies we need divine love.
All happy families resemble one another every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way.
Man is meant for happiness and this happiness is in him in the satisfaction of the daily needs of his existence.
Happiness does not depend on outward things but on the way we see them.
Never did Christ utter a single word attesting to a personal resurrection and a life beyond the grave.
Happiness does not depend on outward things but on the way we see them.
I am used to praying when I am alone thank God. But when I come together with other people when I need more than ever to pray I still cannot get used to it.
There is no greatness where there is not simplicity.
Regard the society of women as a necessary unpleasantness of social life and avoid it as much as possible.
Work is the inevitable condition of human life the true source of human welfare.
The two most powerful warriors are patience and time.
War is so unjust and ugly that all who wage it must try to stifle the voice of conscience within themselves.
In all history there is no war which was not hatched by the governments, the governments alone, independent of the interests of the people, to whom war is always pernicious even when successful.
War on the other hand is such a terrible thing, that no man, especially a Christian man, has the right to assume the responsibility of starting it.
One of the first conditions of happiness is that the link between Man and Nature shall not be broken.
Our body is a machine for living. It is organized for that, it is its nature. Let life go on in it unhindered and let it defend itself.
Even in the valley of the shadow of death, two and two do not make six.
All violence consists in some people forcing others, under threat of suffering or death, to do what they do not want to do.
Joy can only be real if people look upon their life as a service and have a definite object in life outside themselves and their personal happiness.
All happy families resemble one another, each unhappy family is unhappy in its own way.
A man can live and be healthy without killing animals for food; therefore, if he eats meat, he participates in taking animal life merely for the sake of his appetite.
To say that a work of art is good, but incomprehensible to the majority of men, is the same as saying of some kind of food that it is very good but that most people can’t eat it.
The greater the state, the more wrong and cruel its patriotism, and the greater is the sum of suffering upon which its power is founded.
There is no greatness where there is no simplicity, goodness and truth.
Truth, like gold, is to be obtained not by its growth, but by washing away from it all that is not gold.
Faith is the sense of life, that sense by virtue of which man does not destroy himself, but continues to live on. It is the force whereby we live.
Art is not a handicraft, it is the transmission of feeling the artist has experienced.
Government is an association of men who do violence to the rest of us.
An arrogant person considers himself perfect. This is the chief harm of arrogance. It interferes with a person’s main task in life – becoming a better person.
If there existed no external means for dimming their consciences, one-half of the men would at once shoot themselves, because to live contrary to one’s reason is a most intolerable state, and all men of our time are in such a state.
The changes in our life must come from the impossibility to live otherwise than according to the demands of our conscience not from our mental resolution to try a new form of life.