Leo Tolstoy
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.Collection: Men
What is important is not the length of life, but the depth of life. What is important is not to make life longer, but to take your soul out of time, as every sublime act does.Collection: Inspirational
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.Collection: Epic Poems
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.Collection: Life
All art has this characteristic-it unites people.Collection: Art
I did not myself know what I wanted: I feared life, desired to escape from it, yet still hoped something of it.Collection: Wanted
If he be really and seriously seeking to live a good life, the first thing from which he will abstain will always be the use of animal food, because ...its use is simply immoral, as it involves the performance of an act which is contrary to the moral feeling - killing.Collection: Life
In order to obtain and hold power, a man must love it.Collection: Power
He had heard that women often love plain ordinary men, but he did not believe it, because he judged by himself and he could only love beautiful mysterious exceptional women.Collection: Love
Man recognizes that he will not die, only when he recognizes that he was never born, but always has been, is, and will be.Collection: Men
Music is the shorthand of emotion. Emotions, which let themselves be described in words with such difficulty, are directly conveyed to man in music, and in that is its power and significance.Collection: Music
Why does man have reason if he can only be influenced by violence?Collection: 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.Collection: People
Christian love comes from the understanding that there is a unity of divine origins in oneself and in other people, and not only in people, but in all living things.Collection: Life
You're not going to be different ... you're going to be the same as you've always been; with doubts, everlasting dissatisfaction with yourself, vain efforts to amend, and falls, and everlasting expectation, of a happiness which you won't get, and which isn't possible for you.Collection: Fall
The artist's mission must not be to produce an irrefutable solution to a problem, but to compel us to love life in all its countless and inexhaustible manifestations.Collection: Art
Under the influence of music, it seems that I feel what I do not really feel, that I understand what I do not understand, that I do what I cannot do.Collection: Influence
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.Collection: Knowing
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.Collection: War
As long as there are slaughterhouses there will be battlefields. A vegetarian diet is the acid test of humanitarianism.Collection: Peace
A man's every action is inevitably conditioned by what surrounds him and by his own body.Collection: Men
It is not enough to be a hardworking person. Think: what do you work at?Collection: Inspirational
The whole trouble lies in that people think that there are conditions excluding the necessity of love in their intercourse with man, but such conditions do not exist. Things may be treated without love; one may chop wood, make bricks, forge iron without love, but one can no more deal with people without love than one can handle bees without care.Collection: Lying
To regard Christ as God, and to pray to him, are to my mind the greatest possible sacrilege.Collection: Mind
A Russian should rejoice if Poland, the Baltic Provinces, Finland, Armenia, should be separated, freed from Russia; so with an Englishman in regard to Ireland, India and other possessions; and each should help to do this, because the greater the state, the more wrong and cruel is its patriotism, and the greater is the sum of suffering upon which its power is founded. Therefore, if we really wish to be what we profess to be, we must not only cease our present desire for the growth of the state, but we must desire its decrease, its weakening, and help this forward with all our might.Collection: Russia
Indeed, ask every man separately whether he thinks it laudable and worthy of a man of this age to hold a position from which he receives a salary disproportionate to his work; to take from the people--often in poverty--taxes to be spent on constructing cannon, torpedoes, and other instruments of butchery, so as to make war on people with whom we wish to be at peace, and who feel the same wish in regard to us; or to receive a salary for devoting one's whole life to constructing these instruments of butchery, or to preparing oneself and others for the work of murder.Collection: War
One can live magnificently in this world if one knows how to work and how to love.Collection: Love
The vegetarian movement ought to fill with gladness the souls of those who have at heart the realization of God's kingdom upon earth, not because vegetarianism itself is such an important step towards the realization of this kingdom (all real steps are equally important or unimportant), but because it serves as a criterion by which we know that the pursuit of moral perfection on the part of man is genuine and sincere.Collection: Real
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.Collection: Law
Prayer is addressed to the personal God, not because he is personal indeed, I know for certain that he is not personal, because personality is limitation, while God is unlimited.Collection: God
I ask one thing: I ask the right to hope and suffer as I do now." VronskyCollection: Suffering
In our day the feeling of patriotism is an unnatural, irrational, and harmful feeling, and a cause of a great part of the ills from which mankind is suffering, and that, consequently, this feeling - should not be cultivated, as is now being done, but should, on the contrary, be suppressed and eradicated by all means available to rational men.Collection: Mean
We should show life neither as it is or as it ought to be, but only as we see it in our dreams.Collection: Inspirational
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.Collection: Book
Can it be that I have overlooked something, that there is something which I have failed to understand? Is it not possible that this state of despair is common to everyone?Collection: Despair
Art can compel people freely, gladly, and spontaneously to sacrifice themselves in the service of man.Collection: Inspirational
We call beauty that which supplies us with a particular pleasure.Collection: Beauty
History, that is to say, the unconscious, universal life of humanity, in the aggregate, every moment profits by the life of kings for itself, as an instrument for the accomplishment of its own ends.Collection: Kings
Great works of art are only great because they are accessible and comprehensible to everyone.Collection: Art
It is very difficult to tell the truth.Collection: Telling The Truth
Levin scowled. The humiliation of his rejection stung him to the heart, as though it were a fresh wound he had only just received. But he was at home, and at home the very walls are a support.Collection: Wall
It is a rude feeling, because it is natural only to people standing on the lowest level of morality, and expecting from other nations such outrages as they themselves are ready to inflict.Collection: People
The antagonism between life and conscience may be removed in two ways: by a change of life or by a change of conscience.Collection: Life Changing
The main qualities that had earned him this universal respect in the service were, first, an extreme indulgence towards people, based on his awareness of his own shortcomings; second, a perfect liberalism, not the sort he read about in the newspapers, but the sort he had in his blood, which made him treat all people, whatever their rank or status, in a perfectly equal and identical way; and, third - most important - a perfect indifference to the business he was occupied with, owing to which he never got carried away and never made mistakes.Collection: Mistake
And so the liberal tendency became a habit with Stepan Arkadyich, and he liked his newspaper, as he liked a cigar after dinner, for the slight haze it produced in his head.Collection: Dinner
A holy spirit lives within you.Collection: Holiness
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.Collection: Dream
Art should cause violence to be set aside and it is only art that can accomplish this.Collection: Art
Don’t you know that you are all my life to me? ...But peace I do not know, and can’t give to you. My whole being, my love...yes! I cannot think about you and about myself separately. You and I are one to me. And I do not see before us the possibility of peace either for me or for you. I see the possibility of despair, misfortune...or of happiness-what happiness!...Is it impossible?" VronksyCollection: Thinking