Leo Tolstoy
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.Collection: Honesty
Many people have ideas on how others should change; few people have ideas on how they should change.Collection: Wisdom
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.Collection: Inspirational
Once we're thrown off our habitual paths, we think all is lost, but it's only here that the new and the good begins.Collection: Change
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.Collection: Truth
Rest, nature, books, music...such is my idea of happiness.Collection: Book
It is not beauty that endears, it's love that makes us see beauty.Collection: Love
I have to create a circle of reading for myself: Epictetus, Marcus Aurelius, Lao-Tzu, Buddha, Pascal, The New Testament. This is also necessary for all people.Collection: Reading
…the majority of men do not think in order to know the truth, but in order to assure themselves that the life which they lead, and which is agreeable and habitual to them, is the one which coincides with the truth.Collection: Men
He who has love, is in God, and God is in him, for God is love.Collection: Love Is
The kinder and more intelligent a person is, the more kindness he can find in other people. Kindness enriches our life; with kindness mysterious things become clear, difficult things become easy and dull things become cheerful.Collection: Kindness
What counts in making a happy marriage is not so much how compatible you are but how you deal with incompatibility.Collection: Relationship
The key to success in life is using the good thoughts of wise people.Collection: Wise
Then we should find some artificial inoculation against love, as with smallpox.Collection: Should
The earth is the general and equal possession of all humanity and therefore cannot be the property of individuals.Collection: Humanity
She did not want to talk of her sorrow, but with that sorrow in her heart she could not talk of outside matters.Collection: Heart
The higher a man's conception of God, the better will he know Him. And the better he knows God, the nearer will he draw to Him.Collection: Men
No matter when, at whatever moment, if she were asked what she was thinking about she could reply quite correctly - one thing, her happiness and her unhappiness.Collection: Thinking
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.Collection: Children
Lay me down like a stone oh God, and raise me up like a new bread".Collection: Stones
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.Collection: Granted
We acknowledge God only when we are conscious of His manifestation in us.Collection: Conscious
If every man could act as he chose, the whole of history would be a tissue of disconnected accidents.Collection: Men
Love. The reason I dislike that word is that it means too much for me, far more than you can understand." - Anna Karenina {Anna Karenina}Collection: Mean
India, which is the nursery of the great faiths of the worldCollection: Nurse
the very fact of the death of someone close to them aroused in all who heard about it, as always, a feeling of delight that he had died and they hadn't.Collection: Feelings
I am sure that nothing has such a decisive influence upon a man's course as his personal appearance, and not so much his appearance as his belief in its attractiveness or unattractiveness.Collection: Attitude
If religion is the establishing of a relationship between man and the universe, then morality is the explanation of those activities that automatically result when a person maintains a relationship to the universe.Collection: Men
But the peasants - how do the peasants die?Collection: Funny
Humanity unceasingly strives forward from a lower, more partial and obscure understanding of life to one more general and more lucid.Collection: Understanding
Man discovers truth by reason only, not by faith.Collection: Math
Love those you hate you.Collection: Hate
In vain do science and philosophy pose as the arbiters of the human mind, of which they are in fact only the servants. Religion has provided a conception of life, and science travels in the beaten path. Religion reveals the meaning of life, and science only applies this meaning to the course of circumstances.Collection: Philosophy
Religions are the exponents of the highest comprehension of life... within a given age in a given society... a basis for evaluating human sentiments. If feelings bring people nearer to the religion's ideal... they are good; if these estrange them from it, and oppose it, they are bad.Collection: People
Commit no act that is contrary to love.Collection: Love
The subject of history is the life of peoples and of humanity. To catch and pin down in words--that is, to describe directly the life, not only of humanity, but even of a single people, appears to be impossible.Collection: People
In the spiritual realm nothing is indifferent: what is not useful is harmful.Collection: Spiritual
Woman, you see, is an object of such a kind that study it as much as you will, it is always quite new.Collection: Kind
Death is more certain than the morrow, than night following day, than winter following summer. Why is it then that we prepare for the night and for the winter time, but do not prepare for death. We must prepare for death. But there is only one way to prepare for death - and that is to live well.Collection: Summer
Read less, study less, but think moreCollection: Inspirational
Am I mad, to see what others do not see, or are they mad who are responsible for all that I am seeing?Collection: Mad
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.Collection: Love
The Christian churches and Christianity have nothing in common save in name: they are utterly hostile opposites. The churches are arrogance, violence, usurpation, rigidity, death; Christianity is humility, penitence, submissiveness, progress, life.Collection: Christian
The difference between real material poison and intellectual poison is that most material poison is disgusting to the taste, but intellectual poison, which takes the form of cheap newspapers or bad books, can unfortunately sometimes be attractive.Collection: Real
Life could be limitless joy, if we would only take it for what it is, in the way it is given to us.Collection: Joy
Act as if you are, and you will become such.Collection: Inspiring
Mathematics is the queen of disciplines.... it will drive the nonsense out of your head!Collection: Queens
I believe that order is better than chaos, creation better than destruction. I prefer gentleness to violence, forgiveness to vendetta. On the whole I think knowledge is preferable to ignorance, and I am sure human sympathy is more valuable than ideology.Collection: Believe
There is trouble with a wife, but it's even worse with a woman who is not a wife.Collection: Men