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Quotes & Sayings About Death Tolstoy

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Death Tolstoy Quotes By Leo Tolstoy

This is dreadful! Not the suffering and death of the animals, but that man suppresses in himself, unnecessarily, the highest spiritual capacity - that of sympathy and pity toward living creatures like himself - and by violating his own feelings becomes cruel. And how deeply seated in the human heart is the injunction not to take life! — Leo Tolstoy

Death Tolstoy Quotes By Leo Tolstoy

It's all God's will: you can die in your sleep, and God can spare you in battle. — Leo Tolstoy

Death Tolstoy Quotes By Leo Tolstoy

So those are the direct answers human wisdom gives when it answers the question of life. "The life of the body is evil and a lie. And therefore the destruction of this life of the body is something good, and we must desire it," says Socrates. "Life is that which ought not be - an evil - and the going into nothingness is the sole good of life," says Schopenhauer. "Everything in the world - folly and wisdom and riches and poverty and happiness and grief - all is vanity and nonsense. Man will die and nothing will remain. And that is foolish," says Solomon. "One must not live with awareness of the inevitability of suffering, weakness, old age, and death - one must free oneself from life, from all possibility of life," says Buddha. And what these powerful intellects said was said and thought and felt by millions and millions of people like them. And I too thought and felt that. — Leo Tolstoy

Death Tolstoy Quotes By Leo Tolstoy

But the peasants - how do the peasants die? — Leo Tolstoy

Death Tolstoy Quotes By Leo Tolstoy

The worker picked up Pakhom's spade, dug a grave, and buried him - six feet from head to heel, exactly the amount of land a man needs. — Leo Tolstoy

Death Tolstoy Quotes By Leo Tolstoy

Morning or night, Friday or Sunday, made no difference, everything was the same: the gnawing, excruciating, incessant pain; that awareness of life irrevocably passing but not yet gone; that dreadful, loathsome death, the only reality, relentlessly closing in on him; and that same endless lie. What did days, weeks, or hours matter? — Leo Tolstoy

Death Tolstoy Quotes By Atul Gawande

Introduction I learned about a lot of things in medical school, but mortality wasn't one of them. Although I was given a dry, leathery corpse to dissect in my first term, that was solely a way to learn about human anatomy. Our textbooks had almost nothing on aging or frailty or dying. How the process unfolds, how people experience the end of their lives, and how it affects those around them seemed beside the point. The way we saw it, and the way our professors saw it, the purpose of medical schooling was to teach how to save lives, not how to tend to their demise. The one time I remember discussing mortality was during an hour we spent on The Death of Ivan Ilyich, Tolstoy's classic novella. — Atul Gawande

Death Tolstoy Quotes By Leo Tolstoy

He could not help knowing that when he thought of death, he thought with all the force of his intellect. He knew too that the brains of many great men, whose thoughts he had read, had brooded over death and yet knew not a hundredth part of what his wife and Agafea Mihalovna knew about it. — Leo Tolstoy

Death Tolstoy Quotes By Atul Gawande

What tormented Ivan Ilyich most," Tolstoy writes, "was the deception, the lie, which for some reason they all accepted, that he was not dying but was simply ill, and he only need keep quiet and undergo a treatment and then something very good would result." Ivan Ilyich has flashes of hope that maybe things will turn around, but as he grows weaker and more emaciated he knows what is happening. He lives in mounting anguish and fear of death. But death is not a subject that his doctors, friends, or family can countenance. That is what causes him his most profound pain. — Atul Gawande

Death Tolstoy Quotes By Leo Tolstoy

So on receiving the news of Ivan Ilych's death the first thought of each of the gentlemen in that private room was of the changes and promotions it might occasion among themselves — Leo Tolstoy

Death Tolstoy Quotes By Paul Neilan

If Tolstoy were alive today and working at Panopticon Insurance, he'd say that all insurance companies are the same, then throw himself through an eighteenth story window and plunge to his death in a hail of glass and shattered dignity (70). — Paul Neilan

Death Tolstoy Quotes By Leo Tolstoy

But the more intensely he thought, the clearer it became to him that it was indubitably so, that in reality, looking upon life, he had forgotten one little fact-that death will come, and all ends; that nothing was even worth beginning, and that there was no helping it anyway. Yes it was awful, but it was so. — Leo Tolstoy

Death Tolstoy Quotes By Leo Tolstoy

Mento mori - remember death! These are important words. If we kept in mind that we will soon inevitably die, our lives would be completely different. If a person knows that he will die in a half hour, he certainly will not bother doing trivial, stupid, or, especially, bad things during this half hour. Perhaps you have half a century before you die - what makes this any different from a half hour? — Leo Tolstoy

Death Tolstoy Quotes By Leo Tolstoy

The very fact of the death of someone close to them aroused in all who heard about it, as always, a feeling of delight that he had died and they hadn't. — Leo Tolstoy

Death Tolstoy Quotes By Leo Tolstoy

Death is more certain than the morrow, than night following day, than winter following summer. Why is it then that we prepare for the night and for the winter time, but do not prepare for death. We must prepare for death. But there is only one way to prepare for death - and that is to live well. — Leo Tolstoy

Death Tolstoy Quotes By Leo Tolstoy

The more mental effort he made the clearer he saw that it was undoubtedly so: that he had really forgotten and overlooked one little circumstance in life - that Death would come and end everything, so that it was useless to begin anything, and that there was no help for it, Yes it was terrible but true — Leo Tolstoy

Death Tolstoy Quotes By Leo Tolstoy

When you understand that you will die to-morrow, if not to-day, and nothing will be left, then everything is so unimportant! ... So one goes on living, amusing oneself with hunting, with work - anything so as not think of death — Leo Tolstoy

Death Tolstoy Quotes By Leo Tolstoy

Even in the valley of the shadow of death, two and two do not make six. — Leo Tolstoy

Death Tolstoy Quotes By Leo Tolstoy

The doctors are busy with the repulsive but beneficent work of amputation. You see the sharp, curved knife enter the healthy, white body, you see the wounded man suddenly regain consciousness with a piercing cry and curses, you see the army surgeon fling the amputated arm into a corner, you see another wounded man, lying in a litter in the same apartment, shrink convulsively and groan as he gazes at the operation upon his comrade, not so much from physical pain as from the moral torture of anticipation. - You behold the frightful, soul-stirring scenes; you behold war, not from its conventional, beautiful, and brilliant side, with music and drum-beat, with fluttering flags and galloping generals, but you behold war in its real phase - in blood, in suffering, in death. — Leo Tolstoy

Death Tolstoy Quotes By Leo Tolstoy

Man can be master of nothing while he fears death, but he who does not fear it possesses all. If there were no suffering, man would not know his limitations, would not know himself. — Leo Tolstoy

Death Tolstoy Quotes By Leo Tolstoy

He had been stricken with horror, not so much of death, as of life, without any knowledge of whence, and why, and how, and what it was — Leo Tolstoy

Death Tolstoy Quotes By Leo Tolstoy

But when, as is most often the case, the husband and wife accept the external obligation to live together all their lives and have, by the second month, come to loathe the sight of each other, want to get divorced and yet go on living together, it usually ends in that terrible hell that drives them to drink, makes them shoot themselves, kill and poison each other — Leo Tolstoy

Death Tolstoy Quotes By Leo Tolstoy

Whether he is better or worse off there where he awoke after his death, disappointed, or found there what he expected we shall all soon learn. — Leo Tolstoy

Death Tolstoy Quotes By Gregory Benford

the strategic situation foreseen by Robert Heinlein in the death dust story was like "a duel in a vestibule with flamethrowers," anticipating mutual assured destruction and its acronym quite nicely. Tolstoy famously — Gregory Benford

Death Tolstoy Quotes By Leo Tolstoy

He who commits his life to this son of man does not die, but he who does not commit his life to him destroys himself by not trusting to what is life itself Division (death) consists in this, that life came into the world, but men go away from that life. — Leo Tolstoy

Death Tolstoy Quotes By Leo Tolstoy

In the depths of his soul Ivan Ilyich knew that he was dying ... he simply did not, he could not possibly understand it. The example of a syllogism he had studied in Kiesewetter's logic - Caius is a man, men are mortal, therefore Caius is mortal
had seemed to him all his life to be correct only in relation to Caius, but by no means himself. For the man Caius, man in general, it was perfectly correct; but he was not Caius and not man in general, he had always been quite, quite separate from all other human beings ... And Caius is indeed mortal, and it's right that he die, but for me, Vanya, Ivan Ilyich, with all my feelings and thoughts
for me it's another matter. And it cannot be that I should die. It would be too terrible.
So it felt to him. — Leo Tolstoy

Death Tolstoy Quotes By Leo Tolstoy

When a man sees a dying animal, horror comes over him: that which he himself is, his essence, is obviously being annihilated before his eyes
is ceasing to be. But when the dying one is a person, and a beloved person, then, besides a sense of horror at the annihilation of life, there is a feeling of severance and a spiritual wound which, like a physical wound, sometimes kills and sometimes heals, but always hurts and fears any external, irritating touch. — Leo Tolstoy

Death Tolstoy Quotes By Leo Tolstoy

Death destroys the body, as the scaffolding is destroyed after the building is up and finished. And he whose building is up rejoices at the destruction of the scaffolding and of the body. — Leo Tolstoy

Death Tolstoy Quotes By Leo Tolstoy

Why should I live? Why should I do anything? Is there in life any purpose which the inevitable death that awaits me does not undo and destroy? — Leo Tolstoy

Death Tolstoy Quotes By Leo Tolstoy

How often we sin, how much we deceive, and all for what? ... All will end in death, all! — Leo Tolstoy

Death Tolstoy Quotes By Leo Tolstoy

He who has a mistaken idea of life, will always have a mistaken idea of death. — Leo Tolstoy

Death Tolstoy Quotes By Leo Tolstoy

Their daughter came in in full evening dress, her fresh young flesh exposed (making a show of that very flesh which in his own case caused so much suffering), strong, healthy, evidently in love, and impatient with illness, suffering, and death, because they interfered with her happiness. Fyodor — Leo Tolstoy

Death Tolstoy Quotes By Leo Tolstoy

In actuality, it was like the homes of all people who are not really rich but who want to look rich, and therefore end up looking like one another: it had damasks, ebony, plants, carpets, and bronzes, everything dark and gleaming - all the effects a certain class of people produce so as to look like people of a certain class. And his place looked so much like the others that it would never have been noticed, though it all seemed quite exceptional to him. — Leo Tolstoy

Death Tolstoy Quotes By Leo Tolstoy

Love hinders death. Love is life. Anything at all that I understand, I understand only because I love. Everything is - everything exists - only because I love. — Leo Tolstoy

Death Tolstoy Quotes By Leo Tolstoy

As he fell asleep he was still thinking of the subject which now occupied his mind all of the time - of life and death.

'Love? What is love?' he mused.

'Love Hinders death. Love is life. Anything at all that I understand, I understand only because I love. Everything is - everything exists - only because I love. All is bound up in love alone. Love is God, and to die means that I, a tiny particle of love, shall return to the universal and eternal source.' These thoughts seemed comforting to him. But they were only thoughts. Something was wanting in them, there was something one-sided and personal, something intellectual. They were not self-evident. And he was prey to the same restlessness and uncertainty. He fell asleep. — Leo Tolstoy

Death Tolstoy Quotes By Leo Tolstoy

What is the matter with you?" asked Shcherbatsky.
"Nothing much, but there is little to be happy about in this world."
"Little? You'd better come with me to Paris instead of going to some Mulhausen or other. You'll see how jolly it will be!"
"No, I have done with that; it is time for me to die."
"That is a fine thing!" said Shcherbatsky, laughing. "I am only just beginning to live."
"Yes, I thought so too till lately; but now I know that I shall soon die."
Levin was saying what of late he had really been thinking. He saw death and the apprroach of death in everything; but the work he had begun interested him all the more. After all, he had to live his life somehow, til death came. Everything for him was wrapped in darkness; but just because of the darkness, feeling his work to be the only thread to guide him through the darkness, he seized upon it and clung to it with all his might. — Leo Tolstoy

Death Tolstoy Quotes By Leo Tolstoy

What is bad? What is good? What should one love, what hate? Why live, and what am I? What is lie,what is death? What power rules over everything?" he asked himself. And there was no answer to any of these questions except one, which was not logical and was not at all an answer to these questions. This answer was: "You will die
and everything will end. You will die and learn everything
or stop asking. — Leo Tolstoy

Death Tolstoy Quotes By Leo Tolstoy

It can't be that life is so senseless and horrible. But if it really has been so horrible and senseless, why must I die and die in agony? There is something wrong! — Leo Tolstoy

Death Tolstoy Quotes By Leo Tolstoy

Everything ends in death, everything. Death is terrible. — Leo Tolstoy

Death Tolstoy Quotes By Leo Tolstoy

Man cannot possess anything as long as he fears death. But to him who does not fear it, everything belongs. If there was no suffering, man would not know his limits, would not know himself. — Leo Tolstoy

Death Tolstoy Quotes By Leo Tolstoy

Death is finished, he said to himself. It is no more! — Leo Tolstoy

Death Tolstoy Quotes By Leo Tolstoy

The possibility of killing one's self is a safety valve. Having it, man has no right to say life is unbearable. — Leo Tolstoy

Death Tolstoy Quotes By Leo Tolstoy

Suddenly I heard the words of Christ and understood them, and life and death ceased to seem to me evil, and instead of despair I experienced happiness and the joy of life undisturbed by death. — Leo Tolstoy

Death Tolstoy Quotes By Leo Tolstoy

Loving with human love, one may pass from love to hatred; but divine love cannot change. Nothing, not even death, can shatter it. It is all the very nature of the soul. Love is life. All, all that I understand, I understand only because of love. All is bound up in love alone. Love is God and dying means for me a particle of love, to go back to the universal and eternal source of love. — Leo Tolstoy

Death Tolstoy Quotes By Ian McEwan

She went slowly along Theobald's Road, still holding off the moment of her return, wondering again whether it was not love she had lost so much as a modern form of respectability, where it was not contempt and ostracism she feared, as in the novels of Flaubert and Tolstoy, but pity. To be the object of general pity was also a form of social death. The nineteenth century was closer that most women thought. — Ian McEwan

Death Tolstoy Quotes By Leo Tolstoy

I work, I want to do something, but I had forgotten it must all end; I had forgotten
death. — Leo Tolstoy

Death Tolstoy Quotes By Leo Tolstoy

The mere fact of the death of a near acquaintance aroused, as usual, in all who heard of it the complacent feeling that, it is he who is dead and not I. — Leo Tolstoy

Death Tolstoy Quotes By Leo Tolstoy

As though I had been going steadily downhill, imagining that I was going uphill. So it was in fact. In public opinion I was going uphill, and steadily as I got up it, life was ebbing away from me ... And now the work's done, there's only death. — Leo Tolstoy

Death Tolstoy Quotes By Leo Tolstoy

How am I? If we grumble at sickness, God won't grant us death,' replied Platon, and at once resumed the story he had begun. — Leo Tolstoy

Death Tolstoy Quotes By Leo Tolstoy

The question how to live had hardly begun to grow a little clearer to him, when a new, insoluble question presented itself - death. — Leo Tolstoy

Death Tolstoy Quotes By Leo Tolstoy

I'm coming!' he cried joyfully, and that cry awoke him, but woke him up not at all the same person he had been when he fell asleep. He tried to get up but could not, tried to move his arm and could not, to move his leg and also could not, to turn his head and could not. He was surprised but not at all disturbed by this. He understood that this was death, and was not at all disturbed by that either. — Leo Tolstoy

Death Tolstoy Quotes By Anthony Marra

I took a 19th-century Russian novel class in college and have been smitten with Russian literature ever since. Writers like Tolstoy, Dostoyevsky, Grossman, and Solzhenitsyn tackle the great questions of morality, politics, love, and death. — Anthony Marra

Death Tolstoy Quotes By Leo Tolstoy

But the more he strained to think, the clearer it became to him that it was undoubtedly so, that he had actually forgotten, overlooked in his life one small circumstance - that death would come and everything would end, that it was not worth starting anything and that nothing could possibly be done about it. Yes, it was terrible, but it was so. — Leo Tolstoy

Death Tolstoy Quotes By Leo Tolstoy

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

Death Tolstoy Quotes By Leo Tolstoy

One step across the dividing line, so like the one between the living and the dead and you enter an unknown world of suffering and death. What will you find there? Who will be there? There, just just beyond the field, that tree, that sunlit roof? No one knows, and yet you want to know. You dread crossing that line, and yet you want to cross it. You know sooner or later you will have to go across and find out what is there beyond it, just as you must inevitably found out what lies beyond death. Yet here you are, fit and strong, carefree and excited, with men all around you just the same- strong, excited and full of life.' This is what all men think when they get sight of the enemy, or they feel it if they do not think it, and it is this feeling that gives a special lustre and a delicious edge to the awareness of everything that is now happening. — Leo Tolstoy

Death Tolstoy Quotes By Leo Tolstoy

God forgive me everything!' she said, feeling the impossibility of struggling ... — Leo Tolstoy

Death Tolstoy Quotes By Leo Tolstoy

False. Everything by which you have lived and live now is all a deception, a lie, concealing both life and death from you. — Leo Tolstoy

Death Tolstoy Quotes By Leo Tolstoy

I have hundreds of roubles that I don't know what to do with, and she stands there in a tattered coat and looks at me timidly," thought Pierre. "And what does she need money for? As id this money can add one hair's breadth to her happiness, her peace of mind? Can anything in the world make her or me less subject to evil and death? Death, which will end everything and which must come today or tomorrow - in a moment, anyhow, compared with eternity. — Leo Tolstoy

Death Tolstoy Quotes By Leo Tolstoy

It boils down to this: we should have done with humbug, and let war be war, and not a game ... If there were none of this magnanimity business in warfare, we should never go to war, except for something worth facing certain death for. — Leo Tolstoy

Death Tolstoy Quotes By Leo Tolstoy

The Christian churches and Christianity have nothing in common save in name: they are utterly hostile opposites. The churches are arrogance, violence, usurpation, rigidity, death; Christianity is humility, penitence, submissiveness, progress, life. — Leo Tolstoy

Death Tolstoy Quotes By Leo Tolstoy

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

Death Tolstoy Quotes By Leo Tolstoy

A little muzhik was working on the railroad, mumbling in his beard.
And the candle by which she had read the book that was filled with fears, with deceptions, with anguish, and with evil, flared up with greater brightness than she had ever known, revealing to her all that before was in darkness, then flickered, grew faint, and went out
forever. — Leo Tolstoy

Death Tolstoy Quotes By Leo Tolstoy

It is horrible! It is not the suffering and the death of the animals that is horrible, but the fact that the man without any need for so doing crushes his lofty feeling of sympathy and mercy for living creatures and does violence to himself that he may be cruel. The first element of moral life is abstinence. — Leo Tolstoy

Death Tolstoy Quotes By Leo Tolstoy

When seeing a dying animal a man feels a sense of horror: substance similar to his own is perishing before his eyes. But when it is a beloved and intimate human being that is dying, besides this horror at the extinction of life there is a severance, a spiritual wound, which like a physical wound is sometimes fatal and sometimes heals, but always aches and shrinks at any external irritating touch. After Prince Andrew's death Natasha and — Leo Tolstoy

Death Tolstoy Quotes By Leo Tolstoy

It's as if I had been going downhill when I thought I was going uphill. That's how it was. In society's opinion I was heading uphill, but in equal measure life was slipping away from me ... And now it's all over. Nothing left but to die!"
"So what's it all about? What's it for? It's not possible. It's not possible that life could have been as senseless and sickening as this. And if it has really been as sickening and senseless as this why do I have to die, and die in agony? There's something wrong. Maybe I didn't live as I should have done?" came the sudden thought. "But how can that be when I did everything properly?" he wondered, instantly dismissing as a total impossibility the one and only solution to the mystery of life and death. — Leo Tolstoy

Death Tolstoy Quotes By Leo Tolstoy

If you once realize that to-morrow, if not to-day, you will die and nothing will be left of you, everything becomes insignificant! — Leo Tolstoy

Death Tolstoy Quotes By Karen Hitchcock

No one wants to go into a nursing home. My patients fear it; families often feel terrible guilt when the time comes: it is thought of as an abandonment. Nursing homes are where we place our bad outcomes, our frail, our no-longer-independents. They are places people go to wait safely to die. The old doubly incontinents. You might have stood up to Stalin, you might still read Tolstoy, but if you're losing it from both the front and back and you're not a two-year-old, you're going to be hidden away.
"Don't know the nursing homes, they do a pretty good job," a geriatrician said to me. And most of the time they perform their function: as a holding bay for old people. Most of the time. — Karen Hitchcock

Death Tolstoy Quotes By Leo Tolstoy

He sought his former accustomed fear of death and did not find it. "Where is it? What death?" There was no fear because there was no death.
In place of death there was light. — Leo Tolstoy

Death Tolstoy Quotes By Leo Tolstoy

As we live through thousands of dreams in our present life, so is our present life only one of many thousands of such lives which we enter from the other more real life and then return after death. Our life is but one of the dreams of that more real life, and so it is endlessly, until the very last one, the very real the life of God. — Leo Tolstoy

Death Tolstoy Quotes By Leo Tolstoy

All violence consists in some people forcing others, under threat of suffering or death, to do what they do not want to do. — Leo Tolstoy

Death Tolstoy Quotes By Leo Tolstoy

Looking into Napoleon's eyes, Prince Andrei thought about the insignificance of grandeur, about the insignificance of life, the meaning of which no one could understand, and about the still greater insignificance of death, the meaning of which no one among the living could understand or explain. — Leo Tolstoy

Death Tolstoy Quotes By Leo Tolstoy

Well, so it isn't time yet to die, is it? — Leo Tolstoy

Death Tolstoy Quotes By Leo Tolstoy

She began to wish he would die; yet she did not want him to die because then his salary would cease. And this irritated her against him still more. She considered herself dreadfully unhappy just because not even his death could save her, — Leo Tolstoy

Death Tolstoy Quotes By Leo Tolstoy

One step beyond that boundary line which resembles the line dividing the living from the dead lies uncertainty, suffering, and death. And what is there? Who is there?
there beyond that field, that tree, that roof lit up by the sun? No one knows, but one wants to know. You fear and yet long to cross that line, and know that sooner or later it must be crossed and you will have to find out what is there, just as you will inevitably have to learn what lies the other side of death. But you are strong, healthy, cheerful, and excited, and are surrounded by other such excitedly animated and healthy men. — Leo Tolstoy

Death Tolstoy Quotes By Leo Tolstoy

Ivan Ilych had been a colleague of the gentlemen present and was liked by them all. He had been ill for some weeks with an illness said to be incurable. His post had been kept open for him, but there had been conjectures that in case of his death Alexeev might receive his appointment, and that either Vinnikov or Shtabel would succeed Alexeev. So on receiving the news of Ivan Ilych's death the first thought of each of the gentlemen in that private room was of the changes and promotions it might occasion among themselves or their acquaintances. — Leo Tolstoy

Death Tolstoy Quotes By Leo Tolstoy

Having then for the first time clearly understood that before every man, and before himself, there lay only suffering, death, and eternal oblivion, he had concluded that to live under such conditions was impossible; that one must either explain life to oneself so that it does not seem to be an evil mockery by some sort of devil, or one must shoot oneself.
But he had done neither the one nor the other, yet he continued to live, think, and feel, had even at that very time got married, experienced many joys, and been happy whenever he was not thinking of the meaning of his life.
What did that show? It showed that he had lived well, but thought badly. — Leo Tolstoy

Death Tolstoy Quotes By Leo Tolstoy

Love hinders death. Love is life. All, everything that I understand, I understand because I love. Everything is united by it alone. Love is God, and to die means that I, a particle of love, shall return to the general and eternal source. These thoughts seemed to him comforting. But they were only thoughts. Something was lacking in them, they were not clear, they were too one-sidedly personal and brain-spun. And there was the former agitation and obscurity. — Leo Tolstoy

Death Tolstoy Quotes By Leo Tolstoy

He saw nothing but death or the advance towards death in everything. — Leo Tolstoy

Death Tolstoy Quotes By Leo Tolstoy

The true office of any faith is to give life a meaning which death cannot destroy. — Leo Tolstoy

Death Tolstoy Quotes By Leo Tolstoy

And do you know, there's less charm in life, when one thinks of death, but there's more peace. — Leo Tolstoy

Death Tolstoy Quotes By Leo Tolstoy

Death, the inevitable end of everything, confronted him for the first time with irresistible force. — Leo Tolstoy

Death Tolstoy Quotes By Leo Tolstoy

I looked more widely around me, I studied the lives of the masses of humanity, and I saw that, not two or three, or ten, but hundreds, thousands, millions, had so understood the meaning of life that they were able both to live and to die. All these people were well acquainted with the meaning of life and death, quietly labored, endured privation and suffering, lived and died, and saw in all this, not a vain, but a good thing. — Leo Tolstoy

Death Tolstoy Quotes By Leo Tolstoy

You understand that the feeling which makes them work is not a feeling of pettiness, ambition, forgetfulness, which you have yourself experienced, but a different sentiment, one more powerful, and one which has made of them men who live with their ordinary composure under the fire of cannon, amid hundreds of chances of death, instead of the one to which all men are subject who live under these conditions amid incessant labor, poverty, and dirt. Men will not accept these frightful conditions for the sake of a cross or a title, nor because of threats ; there must be another lofty incentive as a cause, and this cause is the feeling which rarely appears, of which a Russian is ashamed, that which lies at the bottom of each man's soul - love for his country. — Leo Tolstoy

Death Tolstoy Quotes By Leo Tolstoy

Here I am alive, and it's not my fault, so I have to try and get by as best I can without hurting anybody until death takes over. — Leo Tolstoy

Death Tolstoy Quotes By Leo Tolstoy

who was it that had really sentenced him to death? Not the men on the commission that had first examined him - not one of them had wished to or, evidently, could have done it. It was not Davout, who had looked at him in so human a way. In another moment Davout would have realized that he was doing wrong, but just then the adjutant had come in and interrupted him. The adjutant, also, had evidently had no evil intent though he might have refrained from coming in. Then who was executing him, killing him, depriving him of life - him, Pierre, with all his memories, aspirations, hopes, and thoughts? Who was doing this? And Pierre felt that it was no one. It was a system - a concurrence of circumstances. A system of some sort was killing him - Pierre - depriving him of life, of everything, annihilating him. — Leo Tolstoy

Death Tolstoy Quotes By Leo Tolstoy

My brother's death: wise, good, serious, he fell ill while still a young man, suffered for more than a year, and died painfully, not understanding why he had lived and still less why he had to die. No theories could give me, or him, any reply to these questions during his slow and painful dying. — Leo Tolstoy

Death Tolstoy Quotes By Leo Tolstoy

Just as in the world of plants and animals nothing ceases to exist, but continually changes its form, the manure into grain, the grain into a food, the tadpole into a frog, the caterpillar into a butterfly, the acorn into an oak, so man also does not perish, but only undergoes a change. He believed in this, and therefore always looked death straight in the face, and bravely bore the sufferings that lead towards it — Leo Tolstoy

Death Tolstoy Quotes By Leo Tolstoy

Here I am ... wanting to accomplish something and completely forgetting it must all end
that there is such a thing as death. — Leo Tolstoy

Death Tolstoy Quotes By Leo Tolstoy

He saw either death or the approach of it everywhere. But his undertaking now occupied him all the more. He had to live his life to the end, until death came. Darkness covered everything for him; but precisely because of this darkness he felt that his undertaking was the only guiding thread in this darkness, and he seized it and held on to it with all his remaining strength. — Leo Tolstoy

Death Tolstoy Quotes By Leo Tolstoy

But neither of them dared speak of it, and not having expressed the one thing that occupied their thoughts, whatever they said rang false. — Leo Tolstoy

Death Tolstoy Quotes By Leo Tolstoy

Yes, it is very likely that I shall be killed tomorrow,' he thought. And suddenly at this thought of death a whole series of most distant, most intimate, memories rose in his imagination: he remembered his last parting from his father and his wife; he remembered the days when he first loved her. He thought of her pregnancy and felt sorry for her and for himself, and in a nervously emotional and softened mood he went out of the hut in which he was billeted with Nesvitsky and began to walk up and down before it. — Leo Tolstoy

Death Tolstoy Quotes By Leo Tolstoy

In spite of death, he felt the need of life and love. He felt that love saved him from despair, and that this love, under the menace of despair, had become still stronger and purer. The one mystery of death, still unsolved, had scarcely passed before his eyes, when another mystery had arisen, as insoluble, urging him to love and to life. — Leo Tolstoy

Death Tolstoy Quotes By Leo Tolstoy

We sin so much, we deceive so much, and all for what? I'm over fifty, my friend ... I'll ... Everything ends in death, everything. Death is terrible. He — Leo Tolstoy

Death Tolstoy Quotes By Leo Tolstoy

Since the moment when, at the sight of his beloved and dying brother, Levin for the first time looked at the questions of life and death in the light of the new convictions, as he called them, which between the ages of twenty and thirty-four had imperceptibly replaced the beliefs of his childhood and youth, he had been less horrified by death than by life without the least knowledge of whence it came, what it is for, why, and what it is, Organisms, their destruction, the indestructibility of matter, the law of the conservation of energy, development - the terms that had superseded these beliefs - were very useful for mental purposes; but they gave no guidance for life, and Levin suddenly felt like a person who has exchanged a thick fur coat for a muslin garment and who, being out in the frost for the first time, becomes clearly convinced, not by arguments, but with the whole of his being, that he is as good as naked and that he must inevitably perish miserably. — Leo Tolstoy

Death Tolstoy Quotes By Leo Tolstoy

Life and death are in God's hands — Leo Tolstoy

Death Tolstoy Quotes By Leo Tolstoy

If there was none of this magnanimity in war, we should go to war only when it was worth while going to certain death, as now. Then there would not be war because Paul Ivanovich had offended Michael Ivanovich. And when there was a war, like this one, it would be war! And then the determination of the troops would be quite different. Then all these Westphalians and Hessians whom Napoleon is leading would not follow him into Russia, and we should not go to fight in Austria and Prussia without knowing why. War is not courtesy but the most horrible thing in life; and we ought to understand that and not play at war. We ought to accept this terrible necessity sternly and seriously. It all lies in that: get rid of falsehood and let war be war and not a game. As it is now, war is the favorite pastime of the idle and frivolous. The military calling is the most highly honored. — Leo Tolstoy