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A real mother, who knows the will of God by experience, will prepare her children also to fulfil it. Such a mother will suffer if she sees her child overfed, effeminate, and dressed-up, for she knows that these things will make it difficult for it to fulfil the will of God which she recognizes.
Leo Tolstoy
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'Respect was invented to cover the empty place where love should be.'
Leo Tolstoy
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I know that my unity with all people cannot be destroyed by national boundaries and government orders.
Leo Tolstoy
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No one has yet added up all the heavy, stress-filled workdays as well as the hundreds, perhaps thousands, of lives that are wasted to produce the world’s amusements. It is for this reason that 'amusements' are not so amusing.
Leo Tolstoy
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Do not resist the evil-doer and take no part in doing so, either in the violent deeds of the administration, in the law courts, the collection of taxes, or above all in soldiering, and no one in the world will be able to enslave you.
Leo Tolstoy
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Все счастливые семьи похожи друг на друга, каждая несчастливая семья несчастлива по-своему.
Leo Tolstoy
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Condemn me if you choose - I do that myself, - but condemn me, and not the path which I am following, and which I point out to those who ask me where, in my opinion, the path is.
Leo Tolstoy
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Reason has discovered the struggle for existence and the law that I must throttle all those who hinder the satisfaction of my desires. That is the deduction reason makes. But the law of loving others could not be discovered by reason, because it is unreasonable.
Leo Tolstoy
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'Let people judge me as they please-I can deceive them, but I cannot deceive myself.'And he suddenly understood that the disgust which he had lately felt toward everybody … was disgust with himself.
Leo Tolstoy
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The assertion that art may be good art and at the same time incomprehensible to a great number of people is extremely unjust, and its consequences are ruinous to art itself...it is the same as saying some kind of food is good but most people can't eat it.
Leo Tolstoy
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Truth is … one approach to the attainment of the good, but in and of itself, it is neither the good nor the beautiful … Socrates, Pascal, and others regarded knowledge of the truth with regard to purposeless objects as incongruous with the good … by exposing deception, truth destroys illusion, which is the principle attribute of beauty.
Leo Tolstoy
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I sit on a man's back, choking him, and making him carry me, and yet assure myself and others that I am very sorry for him and wish to ease his lot by any means possible, except getting off his back.
Leo Tolstoy
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The most difficult subjects can be explained to the most slow-witted man if he has not formed any idea of them already; but the simplest thing cannot be made clear to the most intelligent man if he is firmly persuaded that he knows already, without a shadow of doubt, what is laid before him.
Leo Tolstoy
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Love hinders death. Love is life. All, everything that I understand, I understand only because I love. Everything is, everything exists, only because I love. Everything is united by it alone. Love is God, and to die means that I, a particle of love, shall return to the general and eternal source.
Leo Tolstoy
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The strongest of all warriors are these two - Time and Patience.
Leo Tolstoy
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Tell people that war is an evil, and they will laugh; for who does not know it? Tell them that patriotism is an evil, and most of them will agree, but with a reservation. 'Yes,' they will say, 'wrong patriotism is an evil; but there is another kind, the kind we hold.' But just what this good patriotism is, no one explains.
Leo Tolstoy
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It is terrible when people do not know God, but it is worse when people identify as God what is not God.
Leo Tolstoy
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For us, with the rule of right and wrong given us by Christ, there is nothing for which we have no standard. And there is no greatness where there is not simplicity, goodness, and truth.
Leo Tolstoy
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Go - take the mother's soul, and learn three truths: Learn What dwells in man, What is not given to man, and What men live by. When thou hast learnt these things, thou shalt return to heaven.
Leo Tolstoy
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You worldly-minded people are most unfortunate! You are surrounded with sorrows and troubles overhead and underfoot and to the right and to the left, and you are enigmas even to yourselves.
Leo Tolstoy
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The most important person is the one you are with in this moment.
Leo Tolstoy
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There is one evident, indubitable manifestation of the Divinity, and that is the laws of right which are made known to the world through Revelation.
Leo Tolstoy
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All our problems are caused by forgetting what lives within us, and we sell our souls for the 'bowl of stew' of bodily satisfactions.
Leo Tolstoy
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There is only one enduring happiness in life—to live for others.
Leo Tolstoy
