Leo Tolstoy - Anna Karenina (1877)

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All happy families resemble one another, but each unhappy family is unhappy in its own way.

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

Leo Tolstoy
Are we not all flung into the world for no other purpose than to hate each other, and so to torture ourselves and one another?

Leo Tolstoy
He had heard that women often love plain ordinary men, but he did not believe it, because he judged by himself and he could only love beautiful mysterious exceptional women.

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

Leo Tolstoy
The role of the disappointed lover of a maiden or of any single woman might be ridiculous; but the role of a man who was pursuing a married woman, and who made it the purpose of his life at all cost to draw her into adultery, was one which had in it something beautiful and dignified and could never be ridiculous.

Leo Tolstoy
Woman, you see, is an object of such a kind that study it as much as you will, it is always quite new.

Leo Tolstoy
And so the liberal tendency became a habit with Stepan Arkadyich, and he liked his newspaper, as he liked a cigar after dinner, for the slight haze it produced in his head.

Leo Tolstoy
If they'd told me at college that other people understood the integral calculus, and I didn't, then pride would have come in.

Leo Tolstoy
No matter when, at whatever moment, if she were asked what she was thinking about she could reply quite correctly - one thing, her happiness and her unhappiness.

Leo Tolstoy
And for him, who lived in a certain circle, and who required some mental activity such as usually develops with maturity, having views was as necessary as having a hat.

Leo Tolstoy
You see, if you take pains and learn in order to get a reward, the work will seem hard; but when you work... if you love your work, you will find your reward in that.

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

Leo Tolstoy
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.

Leo Tolstoy
By digging into our souls, we often dig up what might better have remained there unnoticed." Alexis Alexandrovich

Leo Tolstoy
Then he thought himself unhappy, but happiness was all in the future; now he felt that the best happiness was already in the past.

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

Leo Tolstoy
Whatever our fate is or may be, we have made it and do not complain of it." - Vronksy {Anna Karenina}

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

Leo Tolstoy
And Levin, a happy father and a man in perfect health, was several times so near suicide that he hid the cord, lest he be tempted to hang himself, and was afraid to go out with his gun, for fear of shooting himself. But Levin did not shoot himself, and did not hang himself; he went on living.

Leo Tolstoy
Perhaps it's because I appreciate all I have so much that I don't worry about what I haven't got.

Leo Tolstoy
If one loves anyone, one loves the whole person, just as they are, and not as one would like them to be.

Leo Tolstoy
But that's just the aim of civilization - to make everything a source of enjoyment.

Leo Tolstoy
You're not going to be different... you're going to be the same as you've always been; with doubts, everlasting dissatisfaction with yourself, vain efforts to amend, and falls, and everlasting expectation, of a happiness which you won't get, and which isn't possible for you.

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 speaking

Leo Tolstoy
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

Leo Tolstoy
All his life Alexey Alexandrovitch had lived and worked in official spheres, having to do with the reflection of life. And every time he had stumbled against life itself he had shrunk away from it. Now he experienced a feeling akin to that of a man who, wile calmly crossing a precipice by a bridge, should suddenly discover that the bridge is broken, and that there is a chasm below. That chasm was life itself, the bridge that artificial life in which Alexey Alexandrovitch had lived.

Leo Tolstoy
It's like scarlet fever: one has to get it over." "Then one should invent a way of inoculating love, like vaccination.

Leo Tolstoy