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"Sitting in his old schoolroom on the sofa with little cushions on the arms and looking into Natasha's wildly eager eyes, Rostov was carried back into that world of home and childhood which had no meaning for anyone else, but gave him some of the greatest pleasure in his life."
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"Can we account for instinct?' said Monte Cristo. 'Are there not some places where we seem to breathe sadness? - why, we cannot tell. It is a chain of recollections - an idea which carries you back to other times, to other places - which, very likely, have no connection with the present time and place."
"Sometimes people think the old days were better than today. Even though life was simpler and slower, it was not necessarily easier."
"I ordered a coffee and a little something to eat and savored the warmth and dryness. Somewhere in the background Nat King Cole sang a perky tune. I watched the rain beat down on the road outside and told myself that one day this would be twenty years ago."
"Whenever you are transplanted, like me, you will understand how very delightful it is to meet with anything at all like what one has left behind."
"I used to be a poet.My words were traded in marketplaces like pieces of gold.Merchants bought my verses for as much as they paid for saffron and Indian jade.Now I am old...drunk on wine and candle fumes.Alone in this barren room, I speak my psalms to the night air so as to entertain moths before they go off to die.I used to be a poet and my words were gold."
"And my grandmother had bought them in preference to other books, just as she would have preferred to take a house that had a gothic dovecot, or some other such piece of antiquity as would have a pleasant effect on the mind, filling it with a nostalgic longing for impossible journeys through the realms of time."
Explore more quotes by Leo Tolstoy
"Man lives consciously for himself, but is an unconscious instrument in the attainment of the historic, universal, aims of humanity."
"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."
"What is reason given me for, if I am not to use it to avoid bringing unhappy beings into the world!"
"Our life has been joined, not by man, but by God. That union can only be severed by a crime, and a crime of that nature brings its own chastisement."
"The changes in our life must come from the impossibility to live otherwise than according to the demands of our conscience not from our mental resolution to try a new form of life."
"The very same thing, don't you see, may be looked at tragically, and turned into a misery, or it may be looked at simply and even humorously. Possibly you are inclined to look at things too tragically."
"Patriotism and its results--wars--give an enormous revenue to the newspaper trade, and profits to many other trades. Every writer, teacher, and professor is more secure in his place the more he preaches patriotism. Every Emperor and King obtains the more fame the more he is addicted to patriotism."
"He had learned that, as there is no situation in the world in which a man can be happy and perfectly free, so there is no situation in which he can be perfectly unhappy and unfree."
"And not only the pride of intellect, but the stupidity of intellect. And, above all, the dishonesty, yes, the dishonesty of intellect. Yes, indeed, the dishonesty and trickery of intellect."
"With all my soul I wished to be good, but I was young, passionate and alone, completely alone when I sought goodness. Every time I tried to express my most sincere desire, which was to be morally good, I met with contempt and ridicule, but as soon as I yielded to low passions I was praised and encouraged."
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