Top 55 Tolstoy Death Quotes
#1. The possibility of killing one's self is a safety valve. Having it, man has no right to say life is unbearable.
Leo Tolstoy
#3. 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
#4. 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
#5. 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
#6. Here I am ... wanting to accomplish something and completely forgetting it must all end
that there is such a thing as death.
Leo Tolstoy
#7. Just when the question of how to live had become clearer to him, a new insoluble problem presented itself - Death.
Leo Tolstoy
#8. 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
#9. 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
#10. 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
#11. 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
#12. 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
#13. Everything ends in death, everything. Death is terrible.
Leo Tolstoy
#14. 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
#15. 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
#16. And you know, there's less charm in life when you think about death
but it's more peaceful.
Leo Tolstoy
#17. God forgive me everything!' she said, feeling the impossibility of struggling ...
Leo Tolstoy
#18. It's all God's will: you can die in your sleep, and God can spare you in battle.
Leo Tolstoy
#19. Even in the valley of the shadow of death, two and two do not make six.
Leo Tolstoy
#20. 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
#21. 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
#22. Death, the inevitable end of everything, confronted him for the first time with irresistible force.
Leo Tolstoy
#23. 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
#24. 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
#25. 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
#26. 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
#27. 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
#28. 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
#29. 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
#30. 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
#31. 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
#32. 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
#33. 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
#34. 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
#35. 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
#36. He who has a mistaken idea of life, will always have a mistaken idea of death.
Leo Tolstoy
#37. 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
#38. I work, I want to do something, but I had forgotten it must all end; I had forgotten
death.
Leo Tolstoy
#39. 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
#40. He saw nothing but death or the advance towards death in everything.
Leo Tolstoy
#41. 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
#42. The true office of any faith is to give life a meaning which death cannot destroy.
Leo Tolstoy
#43. How often we sin, how much we deceive, and all for what? ... All will end in death, all!
Leo Tolstoy
#44. Death is finished, he said to himself. It is no more!
Leo Tolstoy
#45. Well, so it isn't time yet to die, is it?
Leo Tolstoy
#46. And do you know, there's less charm in life, when one thinks of death, but there's more peace.
Leo Tolstoy
#47. But the peasants - how do the peasants die?
Leo Tolstoy
#48. 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
#49. 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
#50. 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
#51. 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
#52. 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
#53. 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
#54. 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
#55. 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
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