If goodness has causes, it is not goodness; if it has effects, a reward, it is not goodness either. So goodness is outside the chain of cause and effect.

Leo Tolstoy Anna Karenina (1878), Part 8, Chapter 12 Verified source · How we source quotes
6 free wallpapers ↓ Suggest a correction

Where this quote comes from

Konstantin Levin reaches this idea near the end of Anna Karenina, after a peasant tells him that one man lives for his belly while another lives for his soul and remembers God. The remark sets off the understanding Levin has been searching for. Goodness, he decides, cannot be explained by reason or by reward, because it stands outside cause and effect.

Source: Anna Karenina (1878), Part 8, Chapter 12

Keep reading

All Leo Tolstoy quotes
Russian author

I think... if it is true that there are as many minds as there are heads, then there are as many kinds of love as there are hearts.

— Anna Karenina

Russian author

I've always loved you, and when you love someone, you love the whole person, just as he or she is, and not as you would like them to be.

— Anna Karenina

Russian author

They've got no idea what happiness is, they don't know that without this love there is no happiness or unhappiness for us--there is no life.

— Anna Karenina

Russian author

If you love me as you say you do,' she whispered, 'make it so that I am at peace.

— Anna Karenina

Russian author

The whole world is divided for me into two parts: one is she, and there is all happiness, hope, light; the other is where she is not, and there is dejection and darkness...

— War and Peace