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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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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If one has no vanity in this life of ours, there is no sufficient reason for living.
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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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Все счастливые семьи похожи друг на друга, каждая несчастливая семья несчастлива по-своему.
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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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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.
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The strongest of all warriors are these two - Time and Patience.
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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.
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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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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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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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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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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.
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There is only one enduring happiness in life—to live for others.
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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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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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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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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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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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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.
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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.
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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.