Leo Tolstoy Quotes - Page 6

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?

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.

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.

War is not a polite recreation but the vilest thing in life, and we ought to understand that and not play at war. Our attitude towards the fearful necessity of war ought to be stern. It boils down to this: we should have done with humbug, and let war be war and not a game. Otherwise, war is a favourite pastime of the idle and frivolous...

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...

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.

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.

Life meanwhile, the actual life of men with their real interests of health and sickness, labour and rest, with their interests of thought, science, poetry, music, love, affection, hatred, passion, went its way, as always, independently, apart from the political amity or enmity of Napoleon Bonaparte, and apart from all possible reforms.

We are forced to fall back on fatalism as an explanation of irrational events (that is to say, events the reasonableness of which we do not understand). The more we try to explain such events in history reasonably, the more unreasonable and incomprehensible do they become to us.

War is the most painful act of subjection to the laws of God that can be required of the human will.

You consider war to be inevitable? Very good. Let everyone who advocates war be enrolled in a special regiment of advance-guards, for the front of every storm, of every attack, to lead them all!

Next day at the review the Tsar asked Prince Andrey where he desired to serve; and Bolkonsky ruined his chances for ever in the court world by asking to be sent to the front, instead of begging for a post in attendance on the Tsar's person.

And so there was no single cause for war, but it happened simply because it had to happen

Send anyone who preaches war to a special frontline legion -into the assault, into the attack, ahead of everyone.

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.

You need feeling, emotion, to create. You can't create out of indifference.

Se toda a vida complexa de muitas pessoas se desenrola inconscientemente, então é como se essa vida não tivesse existido.