Leo Tolstoy Quotes - Page 8

Todas as famílias felizes se parecem, cada família infeliz é infeliz à sua maneira.

In order to understand, observe, deduce, man must first be conscious of himself as alive.

There are such repulsive faces in the world.

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.

She was utterly unlike what she had been when he first saw her. Both morally and physically she had changed for the worse. [...] He looked at her as a man looks at a faded flower he has gathered, with difficulty recognizing in it the beauty for which he picked and ruined it.

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.

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

True life is lived when tiny changes occur.

When loving with human love one may pass from love to hatred, but divine love cannot change.

The antagonism between life and conscience may be removed in two ways: by a change of life or by a change of conscience.

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.

Anna Mikhaylovna was already embracing her and weeping. The countess wept too. They wept because they were friends, and because they were kindhearted, and because they - friends from childhood - had to think about such a base thing as money, and because their youth was over.... But those tears were pleasant to them both.

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.

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.

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.

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.