Leo Tolstoy · 2356 pages
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“We can know only that we know nothing. And that is the highest degree of human wisdom.”
― Leo Tolstoy, quote from الحرب والسلم [War and Peace]
“Nothing is so necessary for a young man as the company of intelligent women.”
― Leo Tolstoy, quote from الحرب والسلم [War and Peace]
“If everyone fought for their own convictions there would be no war.”
― Leo Tolstoy, quote from الحرب والسلم [War and Peace]
“The strongest of all warriors are these two — Time and Patience.”
― Leo Tolstoy, quote from الحرب والسلم [War and Peace]
“There is no greatness where there is not simplicity, goodness, and truth.”
― Leo Tolstoy, quote from الحرب والسلم [War and Peace]
“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...”
― Leo Tolstoy, quote from الحرب والسلم [War and Peace]
“Pierre was right when he said that one must believe in the possibility of happiness in order to be happy, and I now believe in it. Let the dead bury the dead, but while I'm alive, I must live and be happy.”
― Leo Tolstoy, quote from الحرب والسلم [War and Peace]
“You can love a person dear to you with a human love, but an enemy can only be loved with divine love.”
― Leo Tolstoy, quote from الحرب والسلم [War and Peace]
“It's not given to people to judge what's right or wrong. People have eternally been mistaken and will be mistaken, and in nothing more than in what they consider right and wrong.”
― Leo Tolstoy, quote from الحرب والسلم [War and Peace]
“If we admit that human life can be ruled by reason, then all possibility of life is destroyed.”
― Leo Tolstoy, quote from الحرب والسلم [War and Peace]
“We are asleep until we fall in Love!”
― Leo Tolstoy, quote from الحرب والسلم [War and Peace]
“I simply want to live; to cause no evil to anyone but myself.”
― Leo Tolstoy, quote from الحرب والسلم [War and Peace]
“Everything I know, I know because of love.”
― Leo Tolstoy, quote from الحرب والسلم [War and Peace]
“Because of the self-confidence with which he had spoken, no one could tell whether what he said was very clever or very stupid.”
― Leo Tolstoy, quote from الحرب والسلم [War and Peace]
“Yes, love, ...but not the love that loves for something, to gain something, or because of something, but that love that I felt for the first time, when dying, I saw my enemy and yet loved him. I knew that feeling of love which is the essence of the soul, for which no object is needed. And I know that blissful feeling now too. To love one's neighbours; to love one's enemies. To love everything - to Love God in all His manifestations. Some one dear to one can be loved with human love; but an enemy can only be loved with divine love. And that was why I felt such joy when I felt that I loved that man. What happened to him? Is he alive? ...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 the very nature of the soul. And how many people I have hated in my life. And of all people none I have loved and hated more than her.... If it were only possible for me to see her once more... once, looking into those eyes to say...”
― Leo Tolstoy, quote from الحرب والسلم [War and Peace]
“How can one be well...when one suffers morally?”
― Leo Tolstoy, quote from الحرب والسلم [War and Peace]
“Human science fragments everything in order to understand it, kills everything in order to examine it. ”
― Leo Tolstoy, quote from الحرب والسلم [War and Peace]
“Here's my advice to you: don't marry until you can tell yourself that you've done all you could, and until you've stopped loving the women you've chosen, until you see her clearly, otherwise you'll be cruelly and irremediably mistaken. Marry when you're old and good for nothing...Otherwise all that's good and lofty in you will be lost.”
― Leo Tolstoy, quote from الحرب والسلم [War and Peace]
“Life did not stop, and one had to live.”
― Leo Tolstoy, quote from الحرب والسلم [War and Peace]
“Kings are the slaves of history.”
― Leo Tolstoy, quote from الحرب والسلم [War and Peace]
“A Frenchman's self-assurance stems from his belief that he is mentally and physically irresistibly fascinating to both men and women. An Englishman's self-assurance is founded on his being a citizen of the best organized state in the world and on the fact that, as an Englishman, he always knows what to do, and that whatever he does as an Englishman is unquestionably correct. An Italian is self-assured because he is excitable and easily forgets. A Russian is self-assured simply because he knows nothing and does not want to know anything, since he does not believe in the possibility of knowing anything fully.”
― Leo Tolstoy, quote from الحرب والسلم [War and Peace]
“Pure and complete sorrow is as impossible as pure and complete joy.”
― Leo Tolstoy, quote from الحرب والسلم [War and Peace]
“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, quote from الحرب والسلم [War and Peace]
“A man on a thousand mile walk has to forget his goal and say to himself every morning, 'Today I'm going to cover twenty-five miles and then rest up and sleep.”
― Leo Tolstoy, quote from الحرب والسلم [War and Peace]
“In the best, the friendliest and simplest relations flattery or praise is necessary, just as grease is necessary to keep wheels turning. ”
― Leo Tolstoy, quote from الحرب والسلم [War and Peace]
“One must be cunning and wicked in this world.”
― Leo Tolstoy, quote from الحرب والسلم [War and Peace]
“When you heart is ablaze with the love of God, when you love other people - especially the ripsnorting sinners - so much that you dare to tell them about Jesus with no apologies, then never fear, there will be results.”
― Catherine Marshall, quote from Christy
“Is it possible, I wonder, for a man to truly change? Or do character and habit form the immovable boundaries of our lives?”
― Nicholas Sparks, quote from The Wedding
“Dear daughter, I won't try to call my feeling for Arty love. Call it focus. My focus on Art was an ailment, noncommunicable, and, even to me all these years later, incomprehensible. Now I despise myself. But even so I remember, in hot floods, the way he slept, still as death, with his face washed flat, stony as a carved tomb and exquisite. His weakness and his ravening bitter needs were terrible, and beautiful, and irresistible as an earthquake. He scalded or smothered anyone he needed, but his needing and the hurt that it caused me were the most life I ever had. Remember what a poor thing I have always been and forgive me.
He saw no use for you and you interfered with his use of me. I sent you away to please him, to prove my dedication to him, and to prevent him from killing you...
My job was to come back [from the convent] directly, with nothing leaking from beneath my dark glasses, to give Arty his rubdown and then paint him for the next show, nodding cheerfully all the while, never showing anything but attentive care for his muscular wonderfulness. Because he could have killed you. He could have cut off the money that schooled and fed you. He could have erased you so entirely that I never would have had those letters and report cards and photos, or your crayon pictures, or the chance to spy on you, and to love you secretly when everything else was gone.”
― Katherine Dunn, quote from Geek Love
“i am going to bed. i will have nightmares involving huge monsters in academic robes carrying long bloody butcher knives labeled Excerpt, Selection, Passage, and Abridged.”
― Helene Hanff, quote from 84, Charing Cross Road
“Promise me we'll stay together, okay?" His eyes are once again the clear blue of a perfectly transparent pool. They are eyes to swim in, to float in, forever. "You and me."
"I promise," I say.
Behind us the door creaks open, and I turn around, expecting Raven, just as a voice cuts through the air: "Don't believe her.”
― Lauren Oliver, quote from Pandemonium
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