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]
“O maior pecado, depois do pecado, é a publicação do pecado.”
― Machado de Assis, quote from Quincas Borba
“So too, friend, purification of virtue is for the sake of reaching purification of mind; purification of mind is for the sake of reaching purification of view; purification of view is for the sake of reaching purification by overcoming doubt; purification by overcoming doubt is for the sake of reaching purification by knowledge and vision of what is the path and what is not the path; purification by knowledge and vision of what is the path and what is not the path is for the sake of reaching purification by knowledge and vision of the way; purification by knowledge and vision of the way is for the sake of reaching purification by knowledge and vision; purification by knowledge and vision is for the sake of reaching final Nibbāna [Nirvana] without clinging. It is for the sake of final Nibbāna without clinging that the holy life is lived under the Blessed One.”
― quote from The Middle Length Discourses of the Buddha: A Translation of the Majjhima Nikaya
“I often think that in the world we live in today, where we are threatened by forces as violent and primitive as anything we have ever faced, that it would be wise to look back a little ourselves and embrace our heritage. We were once a nation of hunters. And not the effete, European-style hunters who did it for sport. We hunted for our food, our independence. It’s what made us who we are. But, like so many other virtues that made us unique, we have, as a society, forgotten where we came from and how we got here. What was once both noble and essential has become perverted and indefensible.”
― C.J. Box, quote from Blood Trail
“99.99999999999999999 per cent of every atom consists of empty space. It”
― Holly Smale, quote from Model Misfit
“The architecture of the Minotaur’s heart is ancient. Rough hewn and many chambered, his heart is a plodding laborious thing, built for churning through the millennia. But the blood it pumps—the blood it has pumped for five thousand years, the blood it will pump for the rest of his life—is nearly human blood. It carries with it, through his monster’s veins, the weighty, necessary, terrible stuff of human existence: fear, wonder, hope, wickedness, love. But in the Minotaur’s world it is far easier to kill and devour seven virgins year after year, their rattling bones rising at his feet like a sea of cracked ice, than to accept tenderness and return it.”
― Steven Sherrill, quote from The Minotaur Takes a Cigarette Break
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