“When Mother smiled, no matter how nice her face had been before, it became incomparably nicer and everything around seemed to brighten up as well.”
― Leo Tolstoy, quote from Enfance, Adolescence, Jeunesse
“what time can be more beautiful than the one in which the finest virtues, innocent cheerfulness and indefinable longing for love constitute the sole motives of your life?”
― Leo Tolstoy, quote from Enfance, Adolescence, Jeunesse
“The feelings resembled memories; but memories of what? Apparently one can remember things that have never happened.”
― Leo Tolstoy, quote from Enfance, Adolescence, Jeunesse
“It seems to me that what we call beauty in a face lies in the smile: if the smile heightens the charm of the face, the face is a beautiful one; if it does not alter it, the face is ordinary, and if it is spoilt by a smile, it is ugly.”
― Leo Tolstoy, quote from Enfance, Adolescence, Jeunesse
“Will the freshness, lightheartedness, the need for love, and strength of faith which you have in childhood ever return? What better time than when the two best virtues -- innocent joy and the boundless desire for love -- were the only motives in life?”
― Leo Tolstoy, quote from Enfance, Adolescence, Jeunesse
“Yes, it was real hatred - not the hatred we only read about in novels, which I do not believe in, hatred that is supposed to find satisfaction in doing some one harm - but the hatred that fills you with overpowering aversion for a person who, however, deserves your respect, yet whose hair, his neck, the way he walks, the sound of his voice, his whole person, his every gesture are repulsive to you, and at the same time some unaccountable force draws you to him and compels you to follow his slightest acts with uneasy attention.”
― Leo Tolstoy, quote from Enfance, Adolescence, Jeunesse
“In youth, the powers of the mind are directed wholly to the future, and that future assumes such various, vivid, and alluring forms under the influence of hope; hope based, not upon the experience of the past, but upon an assumed possibility of happiness to come, that dreams of expected felicity constitute in themselves the true happiness of that period of our life. Only God Himself knows whether those blessed dreams of youth were ridiculous, or whose the fault was that they never became realized.”
― Leo Tolstoy, quote from Enfance, Adolescence, Jeunesse
“Besides, to fall out of love and in love at the same time is to love twice as deeply as one did before.”
― Leo Tolstoy, quote from Enfance, Adolescence, Jeunesse
“For the first time I envisaged the idea that we - that is, our family - were not the only people in the world, that not every conceivable interest was centered in ourselves but that there existed another life - that of people who had nothing in common with us, cared nothing for us, had no idea of our existence even. I must have known all this before but I had not known it as I did now - I had not realized it; I had not felt it.”
― Leo Tolstoy, quote from Enfance, Adolescence, Jeunesse
“There are moments when the future looks so black that one is afraid to let one's thoughts dwell on it, refuses to let one's mind function and tries to convince oneself that the future will not be, and the past has not been. At such moments, when the will is not governed or modified by reflection and the only incentives that remain in life are our physical instincts, I can understand how a child, being particularly prone owing to lack of experience to fall into such a state, may without the least hesitation or fear, with a smile of curiosity deliberately set fire to his own house - and then fan the flames where is brothers, his father an his mother, all of who he loves dearly, are sleeping.”
― Leo Tolstoy, quote from Enfance, Adolescence, Jeunesse
“I endeavor to recall the happy comforting dreams interrupted by my returning to consciousness of reality, but to my astonishment so soon as I recapture the thread of my former reverie I find it impossible to go on with it and, most astonishing of all, my imaginings no longer afford me any pleasure.”
― Leo Tolstoy, quote from Enfance, Adolescence, Jeunesse
“Has it ever befallen you, my readers, to become suddenly aware that your conception of things has altered -- as though every object in life had unexpectedly turned a side towards you of which you had hitherto remained unaware? Such a species of moral change occurred, as regards myself, during this journey, and therefore from it I date the beginning of my boyhood. For the first time in my life, I then envisaged the idea that we -- i.e. our family were not the only persons in the world; that not every conceivable interest was centered in ourselves; and that there existed numbers of people who had nothing in common with us, cared nothing for us, and even knew nothing of our existence. No doubt I had known all this before -- only I had not known it then as I know it now; I had never properly felt or understood it.”
― Leo Tolstoy, quote from Enfance, Adolescence, Jeunesse
“Throughout the whole time that Grandmama's body was in the house I was oppressed with the fear of death, for the corpse served as a forcible and disagreeable reminder that I too must die one day -- a feeling which people often mistake for grief.”
― Leo Tolstoy, quote from Enfance, Adolescence, Jeunesse
“Cuando era niño deseaba —sin saber por qué— parecerme a las personas mayores, y desde que fui persona mayor, más de una vez quise parecer un niño.”
― Leo Tolstoy, quote from Enfance, Adolescence, Jeunesse
“El malestar de las personas tímidas se debe a que éstas no saben la opinión que los demás tienen de ellas. Tan pronto como el tímido conoce esta opinión, cualquiera que sea, el malestar desaparece.”
― Leo Tolstoy, quote from Enfance, Adolescence, Jeunesse
“How strange it is that when I was a child I tried to be like a grownup, yet as soon as I ceased to be a child I often longed to be like one.”
― Leo Tolstoy, quote from Enfance, Adolescence, Jeunesse
Leo Tolstoy
Born place: in Yasnaya Polyana, Tula, Russian Empire
Born date September 9, 1828
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“Toby, if I say challenging him is futile, that you'll change nothing and only grant the omen you saw this morning power over you...if I say you can save your life and your heart by walking away from this, will it matter?" Part of me--most of me--wanted to say, "Yes, it would matter; please tell me to stay here. If you tell me, I'll stay." I didn't want to go. I'm not a hero; I never have been. I just do what has to be done. But when you get right down to it, isn't that the definition of hero?”
― Seanan McGuire, quote from An Artificial Night
“Real people are messy and complicated and generally inconvenient, but at least they are there,”
― Cody McFadyen, quote from The Face of Death
“If you can’t stand to be alone with your thoughts, maybe there’s something wrong with your thoughts.”
― Derek Landy, quote from Demon Road
“You know, Guv, if it’s true that Tolkien named the dark lands of Mordor after the Black Country, he was surely looking this way.”
― Angela Marsons, quote from Silent Scream
“It may be that all the laws of energy, and all the properties of matter, and all the chemistry of all the colloids are as powerless to explain the body as they are impotent to comprehend the soul. For my part, I think not.” D’Arcy Thompson”
― James Gleick, quote from Chaos: Making a New Science
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The PigmanBookQuoters is a community of passionate readers who enjoy sharing the most meaningful, memorable and interesting quotes from great books. As the world communicates more and more via texts, memes and sound bytes, short but profound quotes from books have become more relevant and important. For some of us a quote becomes a mantra, a goal or a philosophy by which we live. For all of us, quotes are a great way to remember a book and to carry with us the author’s best ideas.
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