Not one word not one gesture

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Leo Tolstoy

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

  

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

Leo Tolstoy

  

If you look for perfection, you’ll never be content.

Leo Tolstoy

  

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

Leo Tolstoy

  

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.

Leo Tolstoy

  

Respect was invented to cover the empty place where love should be.

Leo Tolstoy

  

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.

Leo Tolstoy

  

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.

Leo Tolstoy

  

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

Leo Tolstoy

  

If you want to be happy, be.

Leo Tolstoy

  

Spring is the time of plans and projects.

Leo Tolstoy

  

Is it really possible to tell someone else what one feels?

Leo Tolstoy

  

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

Leo Tolstoy

  

Nothing is so necessary for a young man as the company of intelligent women.

Leo Tolstoy

  

When you love someone, you love the person as they are, and not as you’d like them to be.

Leo Tolstoy

  

Rummaging in our souls, we often dig up something that ought to have lain there unnoticed.

Leo Tolstoy

  

Be bad, but at least don’t be a liar, a deceiver!

Leo Tolstoy

  

The two most powerful warriors are patience and time.

Leo Tolstoy

  

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}

Leo Tolstoy

  

Anything is better than lies and deceit!

Leo Tolstoy

  

Wrong does not cease to be wrong because the majority share in it.

Leo Tolstoy

  

All the variety, all the charm, all the beauty of life is made up of light and shadow.

Leo Tolstoy

  

I always loved you, and if one loves anyone, one loves the whole person, just as they are and not as one would like them to be. -Dolly

Leo Tolstoy

  

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.

Leo Tolstoy

  

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.

Leo Tolstoy

  

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

Leo Tolstoy

  

Boredom: the desire for desires.

Leo Tolstoy

  

The strongest of all warriors are these two — Time and Patience.

Leo Tolstoy

  

Sometimes she did not know what she feared, what she desired: whether she feared or desired what had been or what would be, and precisely what she desired, she did not know.

Leo Tolstoy

  

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

Leo Tolstoy

  

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

Leo Tolstoy

  

There is no greatness where there is not simplicity, goodness, and truth.

Leo Tolstoy

  

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

Leo Tolstoy

  

The best stories don’t come from «good vs. bad» but «good vs. good.

Leo Tolstoy

  

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.

Leo Tolstoy

  

If you love me as you say you do,’ she whispered, ‘make it so that I am at peace.

Leo Tolstoy

  

True life is lived when tiny changes occur.

Leo Tolstoy

  

It’s hard to love a woman and do anything.

Leo Tolstoy

  

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.

Leo Tolstoy

  

You can love a person dear to you with a human love, but an enemy can only be loved with divine love.

Leo Tolstoy

  

But the law of loving others could not be discovered by reason, because it is unreasonable.

Leo Tolstoy

  

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.

Leo Tolstoy

  

I often think that men don’t understand what is noble and what is ignorant, though they always talk about it.

Leo Tolstoy

  

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…

Leo Tolstoy

  

What counts in making a happy marriage is not so much how compatible you are but how you deal with incompatibility.

Leo Tolstoy

  

Love those you hate you.

Leo Tolstoy

  

He felt now that he was not simply close to her, but that he did not know where he ended and she began.

Leo Tolstoy

  

If we admit that human life can be ruled by reason, then all possibility of life is destroyed.

Leo Tolstoy

  

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.

Leo Tolstoy

  

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

Leo Tolstoy

  

Something magical has happened to me: like a dream when one feels frightened and creepy, and suddenly wakes up to the knowledge that no such terrors exist. I have wakened up.

Leo Tolstoy

  

To get rid of an enemy one must love him.

Leo Tolstoy

  

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.

Leo Tolstoy

  

Not one word, not one gesture of yours shall I, could I, ever forget…

Leo Tolstoy

  

Whatever our fate is or may be, we have made it and do not complain of it.»
— Vronksy {Anna Karenina}

Leo Tolstoy

  

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.

Leo Tolstoy

  

We are asleep until we fall in Love!

Leo Tolstoy

  

I simply want to live; to cause no evil to anyone but myself.

Leo Tolstoy

  

I wanted movement and not a calm course of existence. I wanted excitement and danger and the chance to sacrifice myself for my love.

Leo Tolstoy

  

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.

Leo Tolstoy

  

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.

Leo Tolstoy

  

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.

Leo Tolstoy

  

Everything I know, I know because of love.

Leo Tolstoy

  

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

Leo Tolstoy

  

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

Leo Tolstoy

  

Because of the self-confidence with which he had spoken, no one could tell whether what he said was very clever or very stupid.

Leo Tolstoy

  

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.

Leo Tolstoy

  

Everything intelligent is so boring.

Leo Tolstoy

  

Music is the shorthand of emotion

Leo Tolstoy

  

How can one be well…when one suffers morally?

Leo Tolstoy

  

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

Leo Tolstoy

  

Every heart has its own skeletons.

Leo Tolstoy

  

Human science fragments everything in order to understand it, kills everything in order to examine it.

Leo Tolstoy

  

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

Leo Tolstoy

  

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.

Leo Tolstoy

  

He went down trying not to look long at her, as though she were the sun, but he saw her, as one sees the sun, without looking.

Leo Tolstoy

  

There are no conditions to which a person cannot grow accustomed, especially if he sees that everyone around him lives in the same way.

Leo Tolstoy

  

Everything depends on upbringing.

Leo Tolstoy

  

And you know, there’s less charm in life when you think about death—but it’s more peaceful.

Leo Tolstoy

  

Happiness is an allegory, unhappiness a story.

Leo Tolstoy

  

God is the same everywhere.

Leo Tolstoy

  

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.

Leo Tolstoy

  

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.

Leo Tolstoy

  

The Kingdom of God is Within You,

Leo Tolstoy

  

My principal sin is doubt. I doubt everything, and am in doubt most of the time.

Leo Tolstoy

  

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

Leo Tolstoy

  

The only absolute knowledge attainable by man is that life is meaningless.

Leo Tolstoy

  

Enough or not…it will have to do

Leo Tolstoy

  

What a strange illusion it is to suppose that beauty is goodness.

Leo Tolstoy

  

I am always with myself, and it is I who am my tormentor.

Leo Tolstoy

  

Here I am alive, and it’s not my fault, so I have to try and get by as best I can without hurting anybody until death takes over.

Leo Tolstoy

  

Life did not stop, and one had to live.

Leo Tolstoy

  

Kings are the slaves of history.

Leo Tolstoy

  

There is something in the human spirit that will survive and prevail, there is a tiny and brilliant light burning in the heart of man that will not go out no matter how dark the world becomes.

Leo Tolstoy

  

Pure and complete sorrow is as impossible as pure and complete joy.

Leo Tolstoy

  

Anna spoke not only naturally and intelligently, but intelligently and casually, without attaching any value to her own thoughts, yet giving great value to the thoughts of the one she was talking to.

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?

Leo Tolstoy

  

In the best, the friendliest and simplest relations flattery or praise is necessary, just as grease is necessary to keep wheels turning.

Leo Tolstoy

  

To educate the peasantry, three things are needed: schools, schools and schools.

Leo Tolstoy

  

Happy families are all alike; every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way.

Leo Tolstoy