Leo Tolstoy

The government in which I believe is that which is based on mere moral sanction...the real law lives in the kindness of our hearts. If our hearts are empty, no law or political reform can fill them.

Men are so accustomed to maintaining external order by violence that they cannot conceive of life being possible without violence.

Why does man have reason if he can only be influenced by violence?

Money is a new form of slavery, and distinguishable from the old simply by the fact that it is impersonal - that there is no human relation between master and slave.

Real wisdom is not the knowledge of everything, but the knowledge of which things in life are necessary, which are less necessary, and which are completely unnecessary to know.

Let us forgive each other - only then will we live in peace.

Each person's task in life is to become an increasingly better person.

There is only one time that is important -- NOW! It is the most important time because it is the only time hat we have any power.

It is amazing how complete is the delusion that beauty is goodness. A handsome woman talks nonsense, you listen and hear not nonsense but cleverness. She says and does horrid things, and you see only charm. And if a handsome woman does not say stupid or horrid things, you at once persuade yourself that she is wonderfully clever and moral.

They ought to find out how to vaccinate for love, like smallpox.

And where love ends, hate begins

Darkness had fallen upon everything for him; but just because of this darkness he felt that the one guiding clue in the darkness was his work, and he clutched it and clung to it with all his strength.

Just when the question of how to live had become clearer to him, a new insoluble problem presented itself - Death.

And those who only know the non-platonic love have no need to talk of tragedy. In such love there can be no sort of tragedy.

Anna smiled,as people smile at the weaknesses of those they love. . .

There can be no peace for us, only misery, and the greatest happiness.

I imagine, joking apart, that to know love, one must make mistakes and then correct them.

Why am I going?" he repeated, looking straight into her eyes. "You know that I am going in order to be where you are," said he. "I cannot do otherwise." "Not a word, not a movement of yours will I ever forget, nor can I.

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?

Each time of life has its own kind of love.

There is one thing, and only one thing, in which it is granted to you to be free in life, all else being beyond your power: that is to recognize and profess the truth.