Lev Nikolajevič Tolstoj: Frasi in inglese (pagina 13)

“Life is too long to say anything definitely; always say perhaps.”

“How often we sin, how much we deceive, and all for what?… All will end in death, all!”

“I did not myself know what I wanted: I feared life, desired to escape from it, yet still hoped something of it.”

“I think that to find out what love is really like, one must first make a mistake and then put it right.”

“The example of a syllogism that he had studied in Kiesewetter's logic: Caius is a man, men are mortal, therefore Caius is mortal, had throughout his whole life seemed to him right only in relation to Caius, but not to him at all.”

“Smiling with pleasure, they went through their memories, not sad, old people's memories, but poetic, youthful ones, those impressions from the very distant past where dream merges with reality, and they laughed softly, rejoicing at something.”

“excuse me' he added, taking the opera glasses out of her hands and looking over her bare shoulder at the row of boxes opposite, 'i'm afraid i'm becoming ridiculous”

“It's like scarlet fever: one has to get it over."

"Then one should invent a way of inoculating love, like vaccination.”

“Art begins when a man, with a purpose of communicating to other people a feeling he once experienced, calls it up again within himself and expresses it by certain external signs.”

“Without the support from religion--remember, we talked about it--no father, using only his own resources, would be able to bring up a child.”

“There was no solution, save that universal solution which life gives to all questions, even the most complex and insolvable: One must live in the needs of the day--that is, forget oneself.”

“Progress consists, not in the increase of truth, but in freeing it from its wrappings. The truth is obtained like gold, not by letting it grow bigger, but by washing off from it everything that isn't gold.”

“I can't praise a young lady who is alive only when people are admiring her, but as soon as she is left alone, collapses and finds nothing to her taste--one who is all for show and has no resources in herself”

“Just think! This whole world of ours is only a speck of mildew sprung up on a tiny planet, yet we think we can have something great - thoughts,, actions! They are all but grains of sand”

“They ought to find out how to vaccinate for love, like smallpox.”

“But our idea is that the wolves should be fed and the sheep kept safe.”

“There is no significant idea which cannot be explained to an intelligent twelve year old boy in fifteen minutes.”

“Death is finished, he said to himself. It is no more!”

“If I know the way home and am walking along it drunkenly, is it any less the right way because I am staggering from side to side!”