Leo Tolstoy

“All great literature is one of two stories; a man goes on a journey or a stranger comes to town.”

“Having then for the first time clearly understood that before every man, and before himself, there lay only suffering, death, and eternal oblivion, he had concluded that to live under such conditions was impossible; 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.But he had done neither the one nor the other, yet he continued to live, think, and feel, had even at that very time got married, experienced many joys, and been happy whenever he was not thinking of the meaning of his life.What did that show? It showed that he had lived well, but thought badly.”

“Every lie is a poison; there are no harmless lies. Only the truth is safe. Only the truth gives me consolation - it is the one unbreakable diamond.”

“It would be good," thought Prince Andrei, glancing at the little image that his sister had hung around his neck with such reverence and emotion, "It would be good if everything were as clear and simple as it seems to Princess Marya . How good it would be to know where to seek help in this life, and what to expect after it, beyond the grave! How happy and at peace I should be if I could now say:" Lord have mercy on me!... But to whom should I say this? To some power--- indefinable and incomprehensible, to which I not only cannot appeal, but which I cannot express in words---The Great All or Nothing," he said to himself, "or to that God who has been sewn into this amulet by Marya? There is nothing certain, nothing except the nothingness of everything that is comprehensible to me, and the greatness of something incomprehensible but all important!”

“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.”

“A man is like a fraction whose numerator is what he is and whose denominator is what he thinks of himself. The larger the denominator, the smaller the fraction.”

“Art begins when a man, with a purpose of communicating to other people a feeling he once experienced, calls it up again within himself and expresses it by certain external signs.”

“But the older he grew and the more intimately he came to know his brother, the oftener the thought occurred to him that the power of working for the general welfare – a power of which he felt himself entirely destitute – was not a virtue but rather a lack of something: not a lack of kindly honesty and noble desires and tastes, but a lack of the power of living, of what is called heart – the aspiration which makes a man choose one out of all the innumerable paths of life that present themselves, and desire that alone.”

“The Jew is that sacred being, who has brought down from Heaven the everlasting fire, and has illumined with it the entire world. He is the religious source, spring, and fountain out of which all the rest of the peoples have drawn their beliefs and their religions.”

“As long as there are slaughter houses there will always be battlefields.”

“When one's head is gone one doesn't weep over one's hair!”

“The march of humanity, springing as it does from an infinite multitude of individual wills, is continuous.”

“Instead of going to Paris to attend lectures, go to the public library, and you won't come out for twenty years, if you really wish to learn.”

“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.”

“Every man and every living creature has a sacred right to the gladness of springtime.”

“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.”

“He was afraid of defiling the love which filled his soul.”

“To get rid of an enemy one must love him. ”

“Why does an apple fall when it is ripe? Is it brought down by the force of gravity? Is it because its stalk withers? Because it is dried by the sun, because it grows too heavy, or because the boy standing under the tree wants to eat it? None of these is the cause.... Every action of theirs, that seems to them an act of their own freewill is in the historical sense not free at all but is bound up with the whole course of history and preordained from all eternity.”

“And the moujiks? How do the moujiks die?”

“The man who ten years earlier and one year later was considered a bandit and outlaw is sent a two-day sail from France, to an island given into his possession, with his guards and several million, which are paid to him for some reason.”

“If so many men, so many minds, certainly so many hearts, so many kinds of love.”

“Happiness does not depend on outward things, but on the way we see them.”

“He had the unlucky capacity many men have of seeing and believing in the possibility of goodness and truth, but of seeing the evil and falsehood of life too clearly to take any serious part in it.”

“Love is life. All, everything that I understand, I understand only because I love. Everything is, everything exists, only because I love. Everything is united by it alone. Love is God, and to die means that I, a particle of love, shall return to the general and eternal source.”

“Am I mad, to see what others do not see, or are they mad who are responsible for all that I am seeing?”

“if they hadn’t both been pretending, but had had what is called a heart-to-heart talk, that is, simply told each other just what they were thinking and feeling, then they would just have looked into each other’s eyes, and Constantine would only have said: ‘You’re dying, dying, dying!’ – while Nicholas would simply have replied: ‘I know I’m dying, but I’m afraid, afraid, afraid!’ That’s all they would have said if they’d been talking straight from the heart. But it was impossible to live that way, so Levin tried to do what he’d been trying to do all his life without being able to, what a great many people could do so well, as he observed, and without which life was impossible: he tried to say something different from what he thought, and he always felt it came out false, that his brother caught him out and was irritated by it.”

“Government is an association of men who do violence to the rest of us.”

“The story of Ivan Ilyich life was of the simplest, most ordinary and therefore most terrible". Tolstoy defines living an ordinary life as terrible - I really do have to agree!”

“The two most powerful warriors are patience and time.”

“Which is worse? the wolf who cries before eating the lamb or the wolf who does not.”

“He was not to blame for being born with an irrepressible charachter and a mind some how constrained.”

“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.”

“Enough or not...it will have to do”

“The question of how things will settle down is the only important question...”

“Everyone thinks of changing the world, but no one thinks of changing himself.”

“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.”

“Tuhan tahu, tapi menunggu ..... ”

“Freethinkers are those who are willing to use their minds without prejudice and without fearing to understand things that clash with their own customs, privileges, or beliefs. This state of mind is not common, but it is essential for right thinking...”

“For if we allow that human life is always guided by reason, we destroy the premise that life is possible at all.”

“To tell the truth is very difficult, and young people are rarely capable of it.”

“All happy families are alike; each unhappy family is unhappy in its own way.”

“I sit on a man's back choking him and making him carry me, and yet assure myself and others that I am sorry for him and wish to lighten his load by all means possible… except by getting off his back.”

“In the name of God, stop a moment, cease your work, look around you.”

“Historians are like deaf people who go on answering questions that no one has asked them.”

“True life is lived when tiny changes occur.”

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

“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.”