Thoughts by Leo Tolstoy Quotes in English with Images

But I'm glad you'll see me as I am. Above all, I wouldn't want people to think that I want to prove anything. I don't want to prove anything, I just want to live; to cause no evil to anyone but myself. I have that right, haven't I?

In historic events, the so-called great men are labels giving names to events, and like labels they have but the smallest connection with the event itself. Every act of theirs, which appears to them an act of their own will, is in an historical sense involuntary and is related to the whole course of history and predestined from eternity.

A quiet secluded life in the country, with the possibility of being useful to people to whom it is easy to do good, and who are not accustomed to have it done to them; then work which one hopes may be of some use; then rest, nature, books, music, love for one's neighbor - such is my idea of happiness.

Anna spoke not only naturally and intelligently, but intelligently and casually, without attaching any value to her own thoughts, yet giving great value to the thoughts of the one she was talking to.

We imagine that when we are thrown out of our usual ruts all is lost, but it is only then that what is new and good begins. While there is life there is happiness. There is much, much before us.

And the candle by the light of which she had been reading that book filled with anxieties, deceptions, grief and evil, flared up brighter than ever, lit up for her all that had once been darkness, sputtered, grew dim and went out for ever.

One must do one of two tings: either admit that the existing order of society is just, and then stick up for one's rights in it;or acknowledge that you are enjoying unjust privileges, as i do, and then enjoy them and be satisfied.

At moments of departure and a change of life, people capable of reflecting on their actions usually get into a serious state of mind. At these moments they usually take stock of the past and make plans for the future.

But she was not even grateful to him for it; nothing good on Pierre's part seemed to her to be an effort, it seemed so natural for him to be kind to everyone that there was no merit in his kindness.

True science investigates and brings to human perception such truths and such knowledge as the people of a given time and society consider most important. Art transmits these truths from the region of perception to the region of emotion.

I wanted movement and not a calm course of existence. I wanted excitement and the chance to sacrifice myself for my love. I felt it in myself a superabundance of energy which found no outlet in our quiet life.

And not only the pride of intellect, but the stupidity of intellect. And, above all, the dishonesty, yes, the dishonesty of intellect. Yes, indeed, the dishonesty and trickery of intellect.

The higher a man stands on the social ladder, the greater the number of people he is connected with, the more power he has over other people, the more obvious is the predestination and inevitability of his every action.

We are asleep until we fall in Love!

One must be cunning and wicked in this world.

A wife's a worry, a non-wife's even worse.

Be bad, but at least don’t be a liar, a deceiver!

God is the same everywhere.

Man discovers truth by reason only, not by faith.

To live in the needs of the day, find forgetfulness.

We lost because we told ourselves we lost.

- Quotation

Every heart has its own skeletons.

I am always with myself, and it is I who am my tormentor.

It is not beauty that endears, it's love that makes us see beauty.

There are such repulsive faces in the world.

The Kingdom of God is Within You,

The further one goes, the better the land seems.

Everything ends in death, everything. Death is terrible.

Conceit is incompatible with understanding.

Everything intelligent is so boring.

Anything is better than lies and deceit!

She smiled at him, and at her own fears.

Enough or not...it will have to do.

The only absolute knowledge attainable by man is that life is meaningless.

He was afraid of defiling the love which filled his soul.

Spring is the time of plans and projects.

If you want to be happy, be.

Life did not stop, and one had to live.

The best stories don't come from "good vs. bad" but "good vs. good.

Hell is the inability to love.

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Where love is, there God is also.

Love those you hate you.

Happiness is pleasure without regret.

Let us forgive each other - only then will we live in peace.

Without knowing what I am and why I am here, life is impossible.

A truly wise man is always joyful.

Rest, nature, books, music…such is my idea of happiness.

And where love ends, hate begins.

There is no greatness where there is no simplicity, goodness and truth.

All happy families are alike; each unhappy family is unhappy in its own way.

If you look for perfection, you'll never be content.

How can one be well...when one suffers morally?

Everyone thinks of changing the world, but no one thinks of changing himself.

If you love me as you say you do,' she whispered, 'make it so that I am at peace.

Happiness does not depend on outward things, but on the way we see them.

He was right in saying that the only certain happiness in life is to live for others.

And you know, there's less charm in life when you think about death - but it's more peaceful.

The only thing that we know is that we know nothing and that is the highest flight of human wisdom.

I’ve always loved you, and when you love someone, you love the whole person, just as he or she is, and not as you would like them to be.

I simply want to live; to cause no evil to anyone but myself.

Everything was made bright by her. She was the smile that shed light all around her.

I think… if it is true that there are as many minds as there are heads, then there are as many kinds of love as there are hearts.

I'm getting old, that's the thing! What's in me now won't be there anymore.

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My principal sin is doubt. I doubt everything, and am in doubt most of the time.

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Life could be limitless joy, if we would only take it for what it is, in the way it is given to us.

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War is the most painful act of subjection to the laws of God that can be required of the human will.

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For a few seconds they looked silently into each other's eyes, and the distant and impossible suddenly became near, possible, and inevitable.

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I'm like a starving man who has been given food. Maybe he's cold, and his clothes are torn, and he's ashamed, but he's not unhappy.

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She had no need to ask why he had come. She knew as certainly as if he had told her that he was here to be where she was.

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With friends, one is well; but at home, one is better.

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If you look for perfection, you’ll never be content.

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Kings are the slaves of history.

It is amazing how complete is the delusion that beauty is goodness.

All the variety, all the charm, all the beauty of life is made up of light and shadow.

But that's the whole aim of civilization: to make everything a source of enjoyment.

It's not those who are handsome we love, but those we love who are handsome.

Pure and complete sorrow is as impossible as pure and complete joy.

Historians are like deaf people who go on answering questions that no one has asked them.

Art is not a handicraft; it is the transmission of feeling the artist has experienced.

Can it be that I have not lived as one ought?" suddenly came into his head. "But how not so, when I've done everything as it should be done?

The greater the state, the more wrong and cruel its patriotism, and the greater is the sum of suffering upon which its power is founded.

Though the doctors treated him, let his blood, and gave him medications to drink, he nevertheless recovered.

Some mathematician said: ‘Pleasure lies not in discovering truth, but in seeking it.’

I think... if it is true that there are as many minds as there are heads, then there are as many kinds of love as there are hearts.

In all human sorrow nothing gives comfort but love and faith, and that in the sight of Christ's compassion for us no sorrow is trifling.

I felt a wish never to leave that room - a wish that dawn might never come, that my present frame of mind might never change.

Are we not all flung into the world for no other purpose than to hate each other, and so to torture ourselves and one another?

There is no significant idea which cannot be explained to an intelligent twelve year old boy in fifteen minutes.

And he has to live like this on the edge of destruction, alone, with nobody at all to understand or pity him.

All happy families resemble one another; every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way.

He stepped down, trying not to look long at her, as if she were the sun, yet he saw her, like the sun, even without looking.

Respect was invented to cover the empty place where love should be.

The strongest of all warriors are these two — Time and Patience.

He felt now that he was not simply close to her, but that he did not know where he ended and she began.

Everything depends on upbringing.

Boredom: the desire for desires.

It's not so much that he can't fall in love, but he has not the weakness necessary.

What a strange illusion it is to suppose that beauty is goodness.

As long as there are slaughter houses there will always be battlefields.

It's much better to do good in a way that no one knows anything about it.

But believe me, my dear boy, there is nothing stronger than those two: patience and time, they will do it all.

We can know only that we know nothing. And that is the highest degree of human wisdom.

Some one dear to one can be loved with human love; but an enemy can only be loved with divine love.

All the diversity, all the charm, and all the beauty of life are made up of light and shade.

Friends we shall never be, you know that yourself. Whether we shall be the happiest or the wretchedest of people--that's in your hands.

If I know the way home and am walking along it drunkenly, is it any less the right way because I am staggering from side to side!.

Joy can only be real if people look upon their life as a service and have a definite object in life outside themselves and their personal happiness.

God forgive me everything!’ she said, feeling the impossibility of struggling...

The most important knowledge is that which guides the way you lead your life.

The worker picked up Pakhom’s spade, dug a grave, and buried him - six feet from head to heel, exactly the amount of land a man needs.

There are no conditions to which a man may not become accustomed, particularly if he sees that they are accepted by those about him.

You can love a person dear to you with a human love, but an enemy can only be loved with divine love.

What a strange illusion it is to suppose that beauty is goodness! A beautiful woman utters absurdities: we listen, and we hear not the absurdities but wise thoughts.

And all people live, not by reason of any care they have for themselves, but by the love for them that is in other people.

And those who only know the non-platonic love have no need to talk of tragedy. In such love there can be no sort of tragedy.

What am I coming for?" he repeated, looking straight into her eyes. "You know that I have come to be where you are," he said; "I can't help it.

In the best, the friendliest and simplest relations flattery or praise is necessary, just as grease is necessary to keep wheels turning.

Because of the self-confidence with which he had spoken, no one could tell whether what he said was very clever or very stupid.

Which is worse? the wolf who cries before eating the lamb or the wolf who does not.

Joy can be real only if people look upon their life as a service, and have a definite object in life outside themselves and their personal happiness.

What energy!' I thought. 'Man has conquered everything, and destroyed millions of plants, yet this one won't submit.

I often think that men don't understand what is noble and what is ignorant, though they always talk about it.

When you love someone, you love the person as they are, and not as you’d like them to be.

Ivan Ilych's life had been most simple and most ordinary and therefore most terrible.

He did what heroes do after their work is accomplished; he died.

Not one word, not one gesture of yours shall I, could I, ever forget...

But every acquisition that is disproportionate to the labor spent on it is dishonest.

In the midst of winter, I find within me the invisible summer...

Is it really possible to tell someone else what one feels?

To get rid of an enemy one must love him.

So he lived, not knowing and not seeing any chance of knowing what he was and for what purpose he had been placed in the word.

A man's every action is inevitably conditioned by what surrounds him and by his own body.

A desire of desires: the melancholy.

Life is too long to say anything definitely; always say perhaps.

If everyone fought for their own convictions there would be no war.

History would be an excellent thing if only it were true.

He never chooses an opinion, he just wears whatever happens to be in style.

Nothing is so necessary for a young man as the company of intelligent women.

Every man had his personal habits, passions, and impulses toward goodness, beauty, and truth.

We should show life neither as it is or as it ought to be, but only as we see it in our dreams.

Vegetarianism is the taproot of humanitarianism.

Happiness is an allegory, unhappiness a story.

It was all so strange, so unlike what he had been looking forward to.

I don't allow myself to doubt myself even for a moment.

In the name of God, stop a moment, cease your work, look around you.

Our body is a machine for living. It is organized for that, it is its nature. Let life go on in it unhindered and let it defend itself.

In infinite time, in infinite matter, in infinite space, is formed a bubble organism, and that bubble lasts a while and bursts, and that bubble is Me.

Without knowing what I am and why I am here, life's impossible; and that I can't know, and so I can't live," Levin said to himself.

Don't seek God in temples. He is close to you. He is within you. Only you should surrender to Him and you will rise above happiness and unhappiness.

And so there was no single cause for war, but it happened simply because it had to happen.

Her maternal instinct told her Natasha had too much of something, and because of this she would not be happy.

Perhaps it's because I appreciate all I have so much that I don't worry about what I haven't got.

Human science fragments everything in order to understand it, kills everything in order to examine it.

Power is the sum total of the wills of the mass, transfered by express or tactic agreement to rulers chosen by the masses.

History would be a wonderful thing – if it were only true.

To speak of it would be giving importance to something that has none.

I often think how unfairly life's good fortune is sometimes distributed.

But our idea is that the wolves should be fed and the sheep kept safe.

What a terrible thing war is, what a terrible thing!

It seems that only God can know the truth; it is to Him alone we must appeal, and from Him alone expect mercy.

The feelings resembled memories; but memories of what? Apparently one can remember things that have never happened.

There will be today, there will be tomorrow, there will be always, and there was yesterday, and there was the day before...

I think that in order to know love one must make a mistake and then correct it.

He went down trying not to look long at her, as though she were the sun, but he saw her, as one sees the sun, without looking.

Vengeance is mine, I will repay.

Yes, there is something uncanny, demonic and fascinating in her.

Then we should find some artificial inoculation against love, as with smallpox.

If so many men, so many minds, certainly so many hearts, so many kinds of love.

Whatever our fate is or may be, we have made it and do not complain of it.

There can be no peace for us, only misery, and the greatest happiness.

Anna smiled,as people smile at the weaknesses of those they love. . .

Music is the shorthand of emotion.

Chance created the situation; genius made use of it.

The march of humanity, springing as it does from an infinite multitude of individual wills, is continuous.

We love people not so much for the good they've done us, as for the good we've done them.

No one is satisfied with his position, but every one is satisfied with his wit.

Power is a word the meaning of which we do not understand.

I am not strange but I feel queer. I am like that sometimes. I feel like crying all the time. It is very silly but it will pass.

For if we allow that human life is always guided by reason, we destroy the premise that life is possible at all.

All great literature is one of two stories; a man goes on a journey or a stranger comes to town.

Rummaging in our souls, we often dig up something that ought to have lain there unnoticed.

In order to understand, observe, deduce, man must first be conscious of himself as alive.

There is trouble with a wife, but it's even worse with a woman who is not a wife.

The goal of the artist is not to solve a question irrefutably, but to force people to love life in all its countless, inexhaustible manifestations.

There lay between them, separating them, that same terrible line of the unknown and of fear, like the line separating the living from the dead.

The most mentally deranged people are certainly those who see in others indications of insanity they do not notice in themselves.

Man lives consciously for himself, but serves as an unconscious instrument for the achievement of historical, universally human goals.

Every lie is a poison; there are no harmless lies. Only the truth is safe. Only the truth gives me consolation - it is the one unbreakable diamond.

I wanted movement and not a calm course of existence. I wanted excitement and danger and the chance to sacrifice myself for my love.

Everything comes in time to him who knows how to wait . . . there is nothing stronger than these two: patience and time, they will do it all.

It's too easy to criticize a man when he's out of favour, and to make him shoulder the blame for everybody else's mistakes.

He walked down, for a long while avoiding looking at her as at the sun, but seeing her, as one does the sun, without looking.

If you feel that you are not free, look for the reason inside you.

Life is fragile and absurd.

Reason is often the slave of sin; it strives to justify it.

True life is lived when tiny changes occur.

Writing laws is easy, but governing is difficult.

Woman, you see, is an object of such a kind that study it as much as you will, it is always quite new.

Life and death are in God's hands.

Death is finished, he said to himself. It is no more!

Talent is the capacity to direct concentrated attention upon the subject: "the gift of seeing what others have not seen.

To tell the truth is very difficult, and young people are rarely capable of it.

But live while you live, tomorrow you die...

Everything I know, I know because of love.

I don’t count life as life without love.

He sends a cross, but He also sends the strength to bear it.

I can’t think of you and myself apart. You and I are the same to me.

I think that to find out what love is really like, one must first make a mistake and then put it right.

He felt himself, and did not want to be anyone else. All he wanted now was to be better than before.

Men never understand what honor is, though they're always talking about it.

We are conscious of the force of man's life, and we call it freedom.

Some mathematician has said pleasure lies not in discovering truth, but in seeking it.

Instead of going to Paris to attend lectures, go to the public library, and you won't come out for twenty years, if you really wish to learn.

Respect is an invention of people who want to cover up the empty place where love should be.

This history of culture will explain to us the motives, the conditions of life, and the thought of the writer or reformer.

Joy can be real only if people look on their life as a service, and have a definite object in life outside themselves and their personal happiness.

Love them that hate you, but you can't love those you hate.

All families are happy, all families are alike.

What counts in making a happy marriage is not so much how compatible you are but how you deal with incompatibility.

When you love someone, you love the person as they are, and not as you'd like them to be.

Loving the same man or woman all your life, why, that's like supposing the same candle could last you all your life

All we can know is that we know nothing. And that's the height of human wisdom.

Pierre was one of those people who are strong only when they feel themselves perfectly pure.

The subject of history is the life of peoples and mankind.

The aim of civilization is to enable us to get enjoyment out of everything.

The sole meaning of life is to serve humanity.

I have learned that men live not by selfishness, but by love.

You need feeling, emotion, to create. You can't create out of indifference.

It's different for you and me. You study, you become enlightened; I study, I become confused.

Many people have ideas on how others should change; few people have ideas on how they should change.

I did not myself know what I wanted: I feared life, desired to escape from it, yet still hoped something of it.

Art should cause violence to be set aside and it is only art that can accomplish this.

It is easier to produce ten volumes of philosophical writing than to put one principle into practice.

Error is the force that welds men together; truth is communicated to men only by deeds of truth.

But that what was for him the greatest and most cruel injustice appeared to others a quite ordinary occurrence.

Always the same. Now a spark of hope flashes up, then a sea of despair rages, and always pain; always pain, always despair, and always the same. *

A writer is dear and necessary for us only in the measure of which he reveals to us the inner workings of his very soul.

Truth, like gold, is to be obtained not by its growth, but by washing away from it all that is not gold.

He looked at her as a man looks at a faded flower he has gathered , with difficulty recognizing the beauty for which he picked and ruined it.

The only real science is the knowledge of how a person should live his life. And this knowledge is open to everyone.

Government is an association of men who do violence to the rest of us.

It would be a sin to help you destroy yourself.

If you look for perfection, you will never be satisfied.

Those whom God wishes to destroy he drives mad.

A battle is won by him who is firmly resolved to win it.

He liked fishing and seemed to take pride in being able to like such a stupid occupation.

I don't think badly of people. I like everybody, and I'm sorry for everybody.

Happy families are all alike; every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way.

It's all God's will: you can die in your sleep, and God can spare you in battle.

True science investigates and brings to human perception such truths and such knowledge as the people of a given time and society consider most important. Art transmits these truths from the region of perception.

But the law of loving others could not be discovered by reason, because it is unreasonable.

How often we sin, how much we deceive, and all for what?... All will end in death, all!

No one is satisfied with his fortune,and everyone is satisfied with his wit.

Energy rests upon love; and come as it will, there's no forcing it.

The two most powerful warriors are patience and time.

When one's head is gone one doesn't weep over one's hair!

Well, pray if you like, only you'd do better to use your judgment.

To sin is a human business, but to justify sins is a devilish business.

He remembered his mother's love for him, and his family's, and his friends', and the enemy's intention to kill him seemed impossible.

The true meaning of Christ's teaching consists in the recognition of love as the supreme law of life, and therefore not admitting any exceptions.

He felt that he was himself and did not wish to be anyone else. He only wished now to be better than he had been formerly

Whatever question arose, a swarm of these drones, without having finished their buzzing on a previous theme, flew over to the new one and by their hum drowned and obscured the voices of those who were disputing honestly.

Happiness consists in always aspiring perfection, the pause in any level in perfection is the pause of happiness.

What's all this love of arguing? No one ever convinces anyone else.

He is not apprehended by reason, but by life.

Be bad, but at least don't be a liar, a deceiver!

It's hard to love a woman and do anything.

Speech is silver but silence is golden.

The only happy marriages I know are arranged ones.

There are as many kinds of love, as there are hearts.

The pleasure lies not in discovering truth, but in searching for it.

To educate the peasantry, three things are needed: schools, schools and schools.

Wrong does not cease to be wrong because the majority share in it.

Why nowadays there's a new fashion every day.

There is no greatness where there is not simplicity, goodness, and truth.

If we admit that human life can be ruled by reason, then all possibility of life is destroyed.

Every man and every living creature has a sacred right to the gladness of springtime.

One can live magnificently in this world if one knows how to work and how to love.

One of the first conditions of happiness is that the link between Man and Nature shall not be broken.

That one must either explain life to oneself so that it does not seem to be an evil mockery by some sort of devil, or one must shoot oneself.

How strange it is that when I was a child I tried to be like a grownup, yet as soon as I ceased to be a child I often longed to be like one.

Then he thought himself unhappy, but happiness was all in the future; now he felt that the best happiness was already in the past.

We are all created to be miserable, and that we all know it, and all invent means of deceiving each other. And when one sees the truth, what is one to do?

I've always loved you, and when you love someone, you love the whole person, as they are, and not as you'd like them to be.

Teach French and unteach sincerity.

No matter what the work you are doing, be always ready to drop it. And plan it, so as to be able to leave it.

I don't want to prove anything; I merely want to live, to do no one harm but myself. I have the right to do that, haven't I?

I've always loved you, and when you love someone, you love the whole person, just as he or she is, and not as you would like them to be.

They've got no idea what happiness is, they don't know that without this love there is no happiness or unhappiness for us--there is no life.

Seize the moments of happiness, love and be loved! That is the only reality in the world, all else is folly. It is the one thing we are interested in here.

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.

A quiet secluded life in the country, with the possibility of being useful to people to whom it is easy to do good, and who are not accustomed to have it done to them; then work which one hopes may be of some use; then rest, nature, books, music, love for one’s neighbor - such is my idea of happiness.

He could not be mistaken. There were no other eyes like those in the world. There was only one creature in the world who could concentrate for him all the brightness and meaning of life. It was she. It was Kitty.

Just as one candle lights another and can light thousands of other candles, so one heart illuminates another heart and can illuminate thousands of other hearts.

This child, with his naive outlook on life was the compass which showed them the degree of their departure from what they knew but did not want to know.

If there existed no external means for dimming their consciences, one-half of the men would at once shoot themselves, because to live contrary to one’s reason is a most intolerable state, and all men of our time are in such a state.

To say that a work of art is good, but incomprehensible to the majority of men, is the same as saying of some kind of food that it is very good but that most people can't eat it.

The example of a syllogism that he had studied in Kiesewetter's logic: Caius is a man, men are mortal, therefore Caius is mortal, had throughout his whole life seemed to him right only in relation to Caius, but not to him at all.

Man cannot possess anything as long as he fears death. But to him who does not fear it, everything belongs. If there was no suffering, man would not know his limits, would not know himself.

The changes in our life must come from the impossibility to live otherwise than according to the demands of our conscience not from our mental resolution to try a new form of life.

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...

Something magical has happened to me: like a dream when one feels frightened and creepy, and suddenly wakes up to the knowledge that no such terrors exist. I have wakened up.

Doctoring her seemed to her as absurd as putting together the pieces of a broken vase. Her heart was broken. Why would they try to cure her with pills and powders?

Pay bad people with your goodness; fight their hatred with you kindness. Even if you do not achieve victory over other people, you will conquer yourself.

In saying that without the power of the state, evil men would rule over the good. It is taken for granted that the good are precisely those who at the present time have power, and the bad the same who are no subjugated.

But I'm married, and believe me, in getting to know thoroughly one's wife, if one loves her, as some one has said, one gets to know all women better than if one knew thousands of them.

Society in itself is no great harm, but unsatisfied social aspirations are a bad and ugly business. We must certainly accept, and we will.

We walked to meet each other up at the time of our love and then we have been irresistibly drifting in different directions, and there's no altering that.

Our body is a machine for living. It is organized for that, it is its nature. Let life go on in it unhindered and let it defend itself, it will do more than if you paralyze it by encumbering it with remedies.

But my life now, my whole life apart from anything that can happen to me, every minute of it is no more meaningless, as it was before, but it has the positive meaning of goodness, which I have the power to put into it.

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 all possible means - except by getting off his back.

Patience is waiting. Not passively waiting. That is laziness. But to keep going when the going is hard and slow - that is patience. The two most powerful warriors are patience and time.

For man to be able to live he must either not see the infinite, or have such an explanation of the meaning of life as will connect the finite with the infinite.

My life now, my whole life, regardless of all that may happen to me, every minute of it, is not only not meaningless, as it was before, but has the unquestionable meaning of the good which it is in my power to put into it!

It can't be that life is so senseless and horrible. But if it really has been so horrible and senseless, why must I die and die in agony? There is something wrong!

Freethinkers are those who are willing to use their minds without prejudice and without fearing to understand things that clash with their own customs, privileges, or beliefs. This state of mind is not common, but it is essential for right thinking…

People of limited intelligence are fond of talking about "these days," imagining that they have discovered and appraised the peculiarities of "these days" and that human nature changes with the times.

I ask one thing only: I ask for the right to hope, to suffer as I do. But if even that cannot be, command me to disappear, and I disappear. You shall not see me if my presence is distasteful to you.

I know that most men, including those at ease with problems of the greatest complexity, can seldom accept even the simplest and most obvious truth if it be such as would oblige them to admit the falsity of conclusions which they have delighted in explaining to colleagues, which they have proudly taught to others, and which they have woven, thread by thread, into the fabric of their lives.

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.

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.

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.

A man is like a fraction whose numerator is what he is and whose denominator is what he thinks of himself. The larger the denominator, the smaller the fraction.

If, then, I were asked for the most important advice I could give, that which I considered to be the most useful to the men of our century, I should simply say: in the name of God, stop a moment, cease your work, look around you.

Only people who are capable of loving strongly can also suffer great sorrow, but this same necessity of loving serves to counteract their grief and heals them.

All the girls in the world were divided into two classes: one class included all the girls in the world except her, and they had all the usual human feelings and were very ordinary girls; while the other class -herself alone- had no weaknesses and was superior to all humanity.

They say: sufferings are misfortunes," said Pierre. 'But if at once this minute, I was asked, would I remain what I was before I was taken prisoner, or go through it all again, I should say, for God's sake let me rather be a prisoner and eat horseflesh again. We imagine that as soon as we are torn out of our habitual path all is over, but it is only the beginning of something new and good. As long as there is life, there is happiness. There is a great deal, a great deal before us.

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.

A man is never such an egotist as at moments of spiritual ecstasy. At such times it seems to him that there is nothing on earth more splendid and interesting than himself.

When Mother smiled, no matter how nice her face had been before, it became incomparably nicer and everything around seemed to brighten up as well.

Nothing has been discovered, nothing has been invented. We can only know that we know nothing. And that's the highest degree of human wisdom.

There is one thing, and only one thing, in which it is granted to you to be free in life, all else being beyond your power: that is to recognize and profess the truth.

How strange it was to think that he, who such a short time ago dared not believe in the happiness of her loving him, now felt unhappy because she loved him too much!

You've said nothing, of course, and I ask nothing," he was saying; "but you know that friendship's not what I want: that there's only one happiness in life for me, that word that you dislike so…yes, love!…

what time can be more beautiful than the one in which the finest virtues, innocent cheerfulness and indefinable longing for love constitute the sole motives of your life?

Pretence about anything sometimes deceives the wisest and shrewdest man, but, however cunningly it is hidden, a child of the meanest capacity feels it and is repelled by it.

Hypocrisy in anything whatever may deceive the cleverest and most penetrating man, but the least wide-awake of children recognizes it, and is revolted by it, however ingeniously it may be disguised.

It is true, I deny the incomprehensible Trinity, and the fable regarding the fall of man, which is absurd in our day. It is true, I deny the sacrilegious story of a God born of a virgin to redeem the race.

He disliked contradiction, and still more, arguments that were continually skipping from one thing to another, introducing new and disconnected points, so that there was no knowing to which to reply.

What I think about vivisection is that if people admit that they have the right to take or endanger the life of living beings for the benefit of many, there will be no limit to their cruelty.

I have discovered nothing. I have only found out what I knew. I understand the force that in the past gave me life, and now too gives me life. I have been set free from falsity, I have found the Master.

Without the support from religion--remember, we talked about it--no father, using only his own resources, would be able to bring up a child.

These joys were so trifling as to be as imperceptible as grains of gold among the sand, and in moments of depression she saw nothing but the sand; yet there were brighter moments when she felt nothing but joy, saw nothing but the gold.

Darkness had fallen upon everything for him; but just because of this darkness he felt that the one guiding clue in the darkness was his work, and he clutched it and clung to it with all his strength.

A battle is won by the side that is absolutely determined to win. Why did we lose the battle of Austerlitz? Our casualties were about the same as those of the French, but we had told ourselves early in the day that the battle was lost, so it was lost.

I feel not only that I cannot disappear, as nothing disappears in the world, but that I will always be and have always been. I feel that, besides me, above me, spirits live, and that in this world there is truth.

There is nothing, nothing certain but the nothingness of all that is comprehensible to us, and the grandeur of something incomprehensible, but more important! *

There is something in the human spirit that will survive and prevail, there is a tiny and brilliant light burning in the heart of man that will not go out no matter how dark the world becomes.

Meanwhile spring arrived. My old dejection passed away and gave place to the unrest which spring brings with it, full of dreams and vague hopes and desires.

Life is everything. Life is God. Everything shifts and moves, and this movement is God. And while there is life, there is delight in the self-awareness of the divinity. To love life is to love God. The hardest and most blissful thing is to love this life in one's suffering, in the guiltlessness of suffering.

All that day she had had the feeling that she was playing in the theatre with actors better than herself and that her poor playing spoiled the whole thing.

Smiling with pleasure, they went through their memories, not sad, old people's memories, but poetic, youthful ones, those impressions from the very distant past where dream merges with reality, and they laughed softly, rejoicing at something.

He looked at her as a man might look at a faded flower he had plucked, in which it was difficult for him to trace the beauty that had made him pick and so destroy it

There it is!' he thought with rapture. 'When I was already in despair, and when it seemed there would be no end- there it is! She loves me. She's confessed it.

There are many faiths, but the spirit is one — in me, and in you, and in him. So that if everyone believes himself, all will be united; everyone be himself and all will be as one.

Freethinkers are those who are willing to use their minds without prejudice and without fearing to understand things that clash with their own customs, privileges, or beliefs. This state of mind is not common, but it is essential for right thinking;

He sought his former accustomed fear of death and did not find it. "Where is it? What death?" There was no fear because there was no death. In place of death there was light.

I want movement, not a calm course of existence. I want excitement and danger and the chance to sacrifice myself for my love. I feel in myself a superabundance of energy which finds no outlet in our quiet life.

What is precious is not the reward but the work. And I wish you to understand that. If you work and study in order to get a reward, the work will seem hard to you; but when you work, if you love the work, you will find your reward in that.

I can't praise a young lady who is alive only when people are admiring her, but as soon as she is left alone, collapses and finds nothing to her taste--one who is all for show and has no resources in herself.

He stepped down, avoiding any long look at her as one avoids long looks at the sun, but seeing her as one sees the sun, without looking.

Sometimes she did not know what she feared, what she desired: whether she feared or desired what had been or what would be, and precisely what she desired, she did not know.

A man can live and be healthy without killing animals for food; therefore, if he eats meat, he participates in taking animal life merely for the sake of his appetite. And to act so is immoral.

Freethinkers are those who are willing to use their minds without prejudice and without fearing to understand things that clash with their own customs, privileges, or beliefs. This state of mind is not common, but it is essential for right thinking...

Muhammad has always been standing higher than the Christianity. He does not consider god as a human being and never makes himself equal to God. Muslims worship nothing except God and Muhammad is his Messenger. There is no any mystery and secret in it.

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.

He soon felt that the fulfillment of his desires gave him only one grain of the mountain of happiness he had expected. This fulfillment showed him the eternal error men make in imagining that their happiness depends on the realization of their desires.

It is amazing how complete is the delusion that beauty is goodness. A handsome woman talks nonsense, you listen and hear not nonsense but cleverness. She says and does horrid things, and you see only charm. And if a handsome woman does not say stupid or horrid things, you at once persuade yourself that she is wonderfully clever and moral.

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.

There are no conditions to which a person cannot grow accustomed, especially if he sees that everyone around him lives in the same way.

I sit on a man's back choking him and making him carry me, and yet assure myself and others that i am sorry for him and wish to lighten his load by all means possible....except by getting off his back.

You say: I am not free. But I have raised and lowered my arm. Everyone understands that this illogical answer is an irrefutable proof of freedom.

If goodness has causes, it is not goodness; if it has effects, a reward, it is not goodness either. So goodness is outside the chain of cause and effect.

He had the unlucky capacity many men have of seeing and believing in the possibility of goodness and truth, but of seeing the evil and falsehood of life too clearly to take any serious part in it.

I think that when you remember, remember, remember everything like that, you could go on until you remember what was there before you were in the world.

It seems as though mankind has forgotten the laws of its divine Saviour, Who preached love and forgiveness of injuries—and that men attribute the greatest merit to skill in killing one another.

To say that a work of art is good, but incomprehensible to the majority of men, is the same as saying of some kind of food that it is very good but that most people can’t eat it.

She was in that highly-wrought state when the reasoning powers act with great rapidity: the state a man is in before a battle or a struggle, in danger, and at the decisive moments of life - those moments when a man shows once and for all what he is worth, that his past was not lived in vain but was a preparation for these moments.

There was no answer, except the general answer life gives to all the most complex and insoluble questions. That answer is: one must live for the needs of the day, in other words, become oblivious.

The Lord had given them the day and the Lord had given them the strength. And the day and the strength had been dedicated to labor, and the labor was its reward. Who was the labor for? What would be its fruits? These were irrelevant and idle questions.

And the light by which she had read the book filled with troubles, falsehoods, sorrow, and evil, flared up more brightly than ever before, lighted up for her all that had been in darkness, flickered, began to grow dim, and was quenched forever.

Always the same. Now a spark of hope flashes up, then a sea of despair rages, and always pain; always pain, always despair, and always the same. When alone he had a dreadful and distressing desire to call someone, but he knew beforehand that with others present it would be still worse.

Am I mad, to see what others do not see, or are they mad who are responsible for all that I am seeing?

One can no more approach people without love than one can approach bees without care. Such is the quality of bees...

I wanted to run after him, but remembered that it is ridiculous to run after one's wife's lover in one's socks; and I did not wish to be ridiculous but terrible.

Many families remain for years in the same place, though both husband and wife are sick of it, simply because there is neither complete division nor agreement between them.

There is something so enchanting in the smile of melancholy. It is a ray of light in the darkness, a shade between sadness and despair, showing the possibility of consolation.

He had learned that, as there is no situation in the world in which a man can be happy and perfectly free, so there is no situation in which he can be perfectly unhappy and unfree.

Just as a painter needs light in order to put the finishing touches to his picture, so I need an inner light, which I feel I never have enough of in the autumn.

Art begins when a man, with a purpose of communicating to other people a feeling he once experienced, calls it up again within himself and expresses it by certain external signs.

There was no solution, save that universal solution which life gives to all questions, even the most complex and insolvable: One must live in the needs of the day--that is, forget oneself.

The business of art lies just in this, -- to make that understood and felt which, in the form of an argument, might be incomprehensible and inaccessible.

It will pass, it will all pass, we're going to be so happy! If our love could grow any stronger it would grow stronger because there is something horrifying in it.

As often happens between men who have chosen different pursuits, each, while in argument justifying the other's activity, despised it in the depth of his heart.