Leo Tolstoy

“There is no greatness where there is not simplicity.”

“Regard the society of women as a necessary unpleasantness of social life, and avoid it as much as possible.”

“Work is the inevitable condition of human life, the true source of human welfare.”

“I've always loved you, and when you love someone, you love the whole person, just as he or she is, and not as you would like them to be.”

“If you love me as you say you do,' she whispered, 'make it so that I am at peace.”

“The whole world is divided for me into two parts: one is she, and there is all happiness, hope, light; the other is where she is not, and there is dejection and darkness...”

“They've got no idea what happiness is, they don't know that without this love there is no happiness or unhappiness for us--there is no life.”

“You can love a person dear to you with a human love, but an enemy can only be loved with divine love.”

“It's hard to love a woman and do anything.”

“Love those you hate you.”

“We are asleep until we fall in Love!”

“He was afraid of defiling the love which filled his soul.”

“He felt now that he was not simply close to her, but that he did not know where he ended and she began.”

“Everything I know, I know because of love.”

“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.”

“I wanted movement and not a calm course of existence. I wanted excitement and danger and the chance to sacrifice myself for my love.”

“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”

“In the name of God, stop a moment, cease your work, look around you.”

“A quiet secluded life in the country, with the possibility of being useful to people to whom it is easy to do good, and who are not accustomed to have it done to them; then work which one ho...”

“Pierre was right when he said that one must believe in the possibility of happiness in order to be happy, and I now believe in it. Let the dead bury the dead, but while I'm alive, I must liv...”