Leo Tolstoy Quotes
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To love life is to love God. Harder and more blessed than all else is to love this life in one's sufferings, in undeserved sufferings.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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Then I remembered the first lesson God had set me: 'Learn what dwells in man.' And I understood that in man dwells Love! I was glad that God had already begun to show me what He had promised, and I smiled for the first time.
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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.
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I know that my unity with all people cannot be destroyed by national boundaries and government orders.
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And so the arbitrary union of three incommensurate, mutually disconnected concepts became the basis of a bewildering theory... by which one of the lowest renderings of art, art for mere pleasure - against which all of the master teachers warned - was idealized as the ultimate in art.
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Все счастливые семьи похожи друг на друга, каждая несчастливая семья несчастлива по-своему.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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War is not a courtesy but the most horrible thing in life; and we ought to understand that, and not play at war. We ought to accept this terrible necessity sternly and seriously. It all lies in that: get rid of falsehood and let war be war and not a game. As it is now, war is the favourite pastime of the idle and frivolous.
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To be good and lead a good life means to give to others more than one takes from them.
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There is only one enduring happiness in life—to live for others.
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Art is a human activity having for its purpose the transmission to others of the highest and best feelings to which men have risen.
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In order to correctly define art, it is necessary, first of all, to cease to consider it as a means to pleasure and consider it as one of the conditions of human life. ...Reflecting on it in this way, we cannot fail to observe that art is one of the means of affective communication between people.
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Three years ago he was an honest, self-denying youth, ready to devote himself to every good cause; now he was a corrupt and refined egotist, given over to personal enjoyment. … And all this terrible transformation took place in him only because he ceased to have faith in himself, and began to believe in others.
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'Respect was invented to cover the empty place where love should be.'
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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.
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Having acknowledged the measure of the good to be pleasure, i.e., beauty, the European upper classes went back in their comprehension of art to the gross conception of the primitive Greeks which Plato had already condemned. And with this understanding of life, a theory of art was formulated.
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Pure and complete sorrow is as impossible as pure and complete joy.