“We can know only that we know nothing. And that is the highest degree of human wisdom.”
― Leo Tolstoy, quote from War and Peace
“Nothing is so necessary for a young man as the company of intelligent women.”
― Leo Tolstoy, quote from War and Peace
“If everyone fought for their own convictions there would be no war.”
― Leo Tolstoy, quote from War and Peace
“The strongest of all warriors are these two — Time and Patience.”
― Leo Tolstoy, quote from War and Peace
“There is no greatness where there is not simplicity, goodness, and truth.”
― Leo Tolstoy, quote from 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 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 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 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 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 War and Peace
“We are asleep until we fall in Love!”
― Leo Tolstoy, quote from War and Peace
“I simply want to live; to cause no evil to anyone but myself.”
― Leo Tolstoy, quote from War and Peace
“Everything I know, I know because of love.”
― Leo Tolstoy, quote from 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 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 War and Peace
“How can one be well...when one suffers morally?”
― Leo Tolstoy, quote from War and Peace
“Human science fragments everything in order to understand it, kills everything in order to examine it. ”
― Leo Tolstoy, quote from 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 War and Peace
“Life did not stop, and one had to live.”
― Leo Tolstoy, quote from War and Peace
“Kings are the slaves of history.”
― Leo Tolstoy, quote from 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 War and Peace
“Pure and complete sorrow is as impossible as pure and complete joy.”
― Leo Tolstoy, quote from 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 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 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 War and Peace
“One must be cunning and wicked in this world.”
― Leo Tolstoy, quote from War and Peace
Leo Tolstoy
Born place: in Yasnaya Polyana, Tula, Russian Empire
Born date September 9, 1828
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“Losing tears along the seam of your own image of yourself. It is a mark of shame that causes internal injury, but no visible damage.”
― Pat Conroy, quote from My Losing Season: A Memoir
“Sweetie, in our world, fair’s got nothing to do with anything. He who has the greatest power wins. It’s why we’re all willing to kill each other off without flinching. (Solin)”
― Sherrilyn Kenyon, quote from The Dream Hunter
“A woman sees herself dying, in these cases not at the actual moment of death but months, sometimes years before, when death has hideously come to dwell in her. The sufferer makes the acquaintance of the stranger whom she hears coming and going in her brain. She does not know him by sight, it is true, but from the sounds which she hears him regularly make she can form an idea of his habits. Is he a criminal? One morning, she can no longer hear him. He has gone. Ah! If it were only for ever! In the evening he has returned. What are his plans? Her specialist, put to the question, like an adored mistress, replies with avowals that one day are believed, another day fail to convince her. Or rather it is not the mistress’s part but that of the servants one interrogates that the doctor plays. They are only third parties. The person whom we press for an answer, whom we suspect of being about to play us false, is life itself, and although we feel her to be no longer the same we believe in her still or at least remain undecided until the day on which she finally abandons us.”
― Marcel Proust, quote from The Guermantes Way
“Love is random; fear is inevitable.”
― Orson Scott Card, quote from Pastwatch: The Redemption of Christopher Columbus
“NOTHING should more deeply shame the modern student than the recency and inadequacy of his acquaintance with India. Here is a vast peninsula of nearly two million square miles; two-thirds as large as the United States, and twenty times the size of its master, Great Britain; 320,000,000 souls, more than in all North and South America combined, or one-fifth of the population of the earth; an impressive continuity of development and civilization from Mohenjo-daro, 2900 B.C. or earlier, to Gandhi, Raman and Tagore; faiths compassing every stage from barbarous idolatry to the most subtle and spiritual pantheism; philosophers playing a thousand variations on one monistic theme from the Upanishads eight centuries before Christ to Shankara eight centuries after him; scientists developing astronomy three thousand years ago, and winning Nobel prizes in our own time; a democratic constitution of untraceable antiquity in the villages, and wise and beneficent rulers like Ashoka and Akbar in the capitals; minstrels singing great epics almost as old as Homer, and poets holding world audiences today; artists raising gigantic temples for Hindu gods from Tibet to Ceylon and from Cambodia to Java, or carving perfect palaces by the score for Mogul kings and queens—this is the India that patient scholarship is now opening up, like a new intellectual continent, to that Western mind which only yesterday thought civilization an exclusively European thing.I”
― Will Durant, quote from Our Oriental Heritage
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Dysmorphic KingdomBookQuoters is a community of passionate readers who enjoy sharing the most meaningful, memorable and interesting quotes from great books. As the world communicates more and more via texts, memes and sound bytes, short but profound quotes from books have become more relevant and important. For some of us a quote becomes a mantra, a goal or a philosophy by which we live. For all of us, quotes are a great way to remember a book and to carry with us the author’s best ideas.
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