“To speak of it would be giving importance to that which has none.”
“All the variety, all the charm, all the beauty of life is made up of light and shadow.”
Source: Anna Karenina (World Classics, Unabridged)
“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.”
Source: Anna karenina (Arcadia Classics)
“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.”
Source: Anna Karenina (World Classics, Unabridged)
“We imagine that when we are thrown out of our usual ruts all is lost, but it is only then that what is new and good begins. While there is life there is happiness. There is much, much before us.”
Source: War and Peace: plus free audiobook
“Morning or night, Friday or Sunday, made no difference, everything was the same: the gnawing, excruciating, incessant pain; that awareness of life irrevocably passing but not yet gone; that dreadful, loathsome death, the only reality, relentlessly closing in on him; and that same endless lie. What did days, weeks, or hours matter?”
“These principles laid down as in variable rules: that one must pay a card sharper, but need not pay a tailor; that one must never tell a lie to a man, but one may to a woman; that one must never cheat any one, but one may a husband; that one must never pardon an insult, but one may give one and so on. These principles were possibly not reasonable and not good, but they were of unfailing certainty, and so long as he adhered to them, Vronsky felt that his heart was at peace and he could hold his head up.”
“she smiled at him, and at her own fears.”
Source: Delphi Complete Works of Leo Tolstoy (Illustrated)
“He sought his former accustomed fear of death and did not find it. "Where is it? What death?" There was no fear because there was no death. In place of death there was light.”
Source: The Death of Ivan Ilych: English-Russian Parallel Text Edition
“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.”
Source: ANNA KARENINA
“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 of Oldenburg was wronged. We cannot grasp what connection such circumstances have the with the actual fact of slaughter and violence: why because the Duke was wronged, thousands of men from the other side of Europe killed and ruined the people of Smolensk and Moscow and were killed by them.”
Source: The Complete Works of Leo Tolstoy: Novels, Short Stories, Plays, Memoirs, Letters & Essays on Art, Religion and Politics: Anna Karenina, War and Peace, Resurrection, The Death of Ivan Ilych, A Confession, The Cossacks, Correspondences with Gandhi, The Kreutzer Sonata, Fables and Stories for Childrenand Many More
“Not one word, not one gesture of yours shall I, could I, ever forget.”
Source: The Complete Novels of Leo Tolstoy in One Premium Edition (World Classics Series): Anna Karenina, War and Peace, Resurrection, Childhood, Boyhood, Youth, The Cossacks, The Death of Ivan Ilyich... (Including Biographies of the Author)
“There are people who, on meeting a successful rival, no matter in what, are at once disposed to turn their backs on everything good in him, and to see only what is bad. There are people, on the other hand, who desire above all to find in that lucky rival the qualities by which he has outstripped them, and seek with a throbbing ache at heart only what is good.”
Source: Anna Karenina (World Classics, Unabridged)
“I ask one thing only: I ask for the right to hope, to suffer as I do. But if even that cannot be, command me to disappear, and I disappear. You shall not see me if my presence is distasteful to you.”
Source: Anna Karenina (World Classics, Unabridged)
“You've said nothing, of course, and I ask nothing," he was saying; "but you know that friendship's not what I want: that there's only one happiness in life for me, that word that you dislike so...yes, love!”
Source: Anna Karenina (World Classics, Unabridged)
“In spite of death, he felt the need of life and love. He felt that love saved him from despair, and that this love, under the menace of despair, had become still stronger and purer. The one mystery of death, still unsolved, had scarcely passed before his eyes, when another mystery had arisen, as insoluble, urging him to love and to life.”
Source: Anna Karenina (World Classics, Unabridged)
“it's much better to do good in a way that no one knows anything about it.”
Source: ANNA KARENINA
“The Lord had given them the day and the Lord had given them the strength. And the day and the strength had been dedicated to labor, and the labor was its reward. Who was the labor for? What would be its fruits? These were irrelevant and idle questions.”
Source: ANNA KARENINA
“But every acquisition that is disproportionate to the labor spent on it is dishonest.”
Source: ANNA KARENINA
“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.”
“A wife's a worry, a non-wife's even worse.”
“What a strange illusion it is to suppose that beauty is goodness.”
Source: The Kreutzer Sonata and Other Short Stories
“The most mentally deranged people are certainly those who see in others indications of insanity they do not notice in themselves.”
Source: The Death of Ivan Ilyich and Other Stories
“Remember that there is only one important time and it is Now. The present moment is the only time over which we have dominion. The most important person is always the person with whom you are, who is right before you, for who knows if you will have dealings with any other person in the future? The most important pursuit is making that person, the one standing at you side, happy, for that alone is the pursuit of life.”
“But she did not take her eyes from the wheels of the second car. And exactly at the moment when the midpoint between the wheels drew level with her, she threw away the red bag, and drawing her head back into her shoulders, fell on her hands under the car, and with a light movement, as though she would rise immediately, dropped on her knees. And at the instant she was terror-stricken at what she was doing. 'Where am I? What am I doing? What for?' She tried to get up, to throw herself back; but something huge and merciless struck her on the head and dragged her down on her back.”
“It's not so much that he can't fall in love, but he has not the weakness necessary.”
Source: The Complete Novels of Leo Tolstoy in One Premium Edition (World Classics Series): Anna Karenina, War and Peace, Resurrection, Childhood, Boyhood, Youth, The Cossacks, The Death of Ivan Ilyich... (Including Biographies of the Author)
“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.”
Source: ANNA KARENINA – Two Unabridged Translations in One Premium Edition (World Classics Series): The Greatest Romantic Tragedy of All Times from the Renowned Author of War and Peace & The Death of Ivan Ilyich (Including Biographies of the Author)
“Well, pray if you like, only you'd do better to use your judgment.”
“Music makes me forget myself, my true condition, it carries me off into another state of being, one that isn't my own: under the influence of music I have the illusion of feeling things I don't really feel, of understanding things I don't understand, being able to do things I'm not able to do... Can it really be allowable for anyone who feels like it to hypnotize another person, or many other persons, and then do what he likes with them? Particularly if the hypnotist is the first unscrupulous individual who happens to come along?”
“One must do one of two tings: either admit that the existing order of society is just, and then stick up for one's rights in it;or acknowledge that you are enjoying unjust privileges, as i do, and then enjoy them and be satisfied.”
Source: Anna Karenina (World Classics, Unabridged)
“I don't want to prove anything; I merely want to live, to do no one harm but myself. I have the right to do that, haven't I?”
Source: Anna Karenina (World Classics, Unabridged)
“ٰ"The Most difficult thing but an essential one – is to love Life, to love it even while one suffers, because Life is all, Life is God, and to love Life means to love God.”
“We love people not so much for the good they've done us, as for the good we've done them.”
Source: War and Peace: Translated by Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky
“Power is a word the meaning of which we do not understand.”
Source: War and Peace
“Though the doctors treated him, let his blood, and gave him medications to drink, he nevertheless recovered.”
Source: War and Peace: Translated by Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky
“The whole trouble lies in that people think that there are conditions excluding the necessity of love in their intercourse with man, but such conditions do not exist. Things may be treated without love; one may chop wood, make bricks, forge iron without love, but one can no more deal with people without love than one can handle bees without care.”
Source: The Resurrection: Tolstoy's Collections
“At school he had done things which had formerly seemed to him very horrid and made him feel disgusted with himself when he did them; but when later on he saw that such actions were done by people of good position and that they did not regard them as wrong, he was able not exactly to regard them as right, but to forget about them entirely or not be at all troubled at remembering them.”
Source: The Complete Novels of Leo Tolstoy in One Premium Edition (World Classics Series): Anna Karenina, War and Peace, Resurrection, Childhood, Boyhood, Youth, The Cossacks, The Death of Ivan Ilyich... (Including Biographies of the Author)
“but that what was for him the greatest and most cruel injustice appeared to others a quite ordinary occurrence.”
Source: The Death of Ivan Ilyich
“Several times I asked myself, "Can it be that I have overlooked something, that there is something which I have failed to understand? Is it not possible that this state of despair is common to everyone?" And I searched for an answer to my questions in every area of knowledge acquired by man. For a long time I carried on my painstaking search; I did not search casually, out of mere curiosity, but painfully, persistently, day and night, like a dying man seeking salvation. I found nothing.”
“I do value my work awfully; but in reality only consider this: all this world of ours is nothing but a speck of mildew, which has grown up on a tiny planet. And for us to suppose we can have something great - ideas, work - it's all dust and ashes.”
Source: Delphi Complete Works of Leo Tolstoy (Illustrated)
“When you understand that you will die to-morrow, if not to-day, and nothing will be left, then everything is so unimportant!... So one goes on living, amusing oneself with hunting, with work - anything so as not think of death”
Source: Anna Karenina (World Classics, Unabridged)
“I wanted to run after him, but remembered that it is ridiculous to run after one's wife's lover in one's socks; and I did not wish to be ridiculous but terrible.”
Source: The Kreutzer Sonata and Other Stories
“Those whom God wishes to destroy he drives mad.”
Source: War and Peace: Top 100 Classic Novels
“No one is satisfied with his position, but every one is satisfied with his wit”
Source: ANNA KARENINA – Two Unabridged Translations in One Premium Edition (World Classics Series): The Greatest Romantic Tragedy of All Times from the Renowned Author of War and Peace & The Death of Ivan Ilyich (Including Biographies of the Author)
“Everything comes in time to him who knows how to wait. There is nothing stronger than those two: patience and time, they will do it all.”
“He knew she was there by the joy and terror that took possession of his heart [...] Everything was lit up by her. She was the smile that brightened everything around.”
Source: ANNA KARENINA
“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”
Source: The Complete Works of Leo Tolstoy: Novels, Short Stories, Plays, Memoirs, Letters & Essays on Art, Religion and Politics: Anna Karenina, War and Peace, Resurrection, The Death of Ivan Ilych, A Confession, The Cossacks, Correspondences with Gandhi, The Kreutzer Sonata, Fables and Stories for Childrenand Many More
“She put both her hands on his shoulders and gazed at him long, with a deep look of ecstasy and yet searchingly. She scrutinized his face to make up for the time she had not seen him. She compared, as she did at every interview with him, the image her fancy painted of him (incomparably finer than, and impossible in actual existence) with his real self.”
“Then he thought himself unhappy, but happiness was all in the future; now he felt that the best happiness was already in the past.”
Source: ANNA KARENINA – Two Unabridged Translations in One Premium Edition (World Classics Series): The Greatest Romantic Tragedy of All Times from the Renowned Author of War and Peace & The Death of Ivan Ilyich (Including Biographies of the Author)
“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”
Source: The Complete Novels of Leo Tolstoy in One Premium Edition (World Classics Series): Anna Karenina, War and Peace, Resurrection, Childhood, Boyhood, Youth, The Cossacks, The Death of Ivan Ilyich... (Including Biographies of the Author)
