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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.

Leo Tolstoy

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Leo Tolstoy
Age: 82 †
Born: 1828
Born: January 1
Died: 1910
Died: January 1
Diarist
Esperantist
Essayist
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Opinion Journalist
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Tolstoi
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Lev Nikolaevich
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Лев Николаевич
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Pure and complete sorrow is as impossible as pure and complete joy.
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There are two Gods, there is the God that people generally believe in - a God who has to serve them. This God does not exist. But the God whom people forget - the God whom we all have to serve - exists, and is the prime cause of our existence and of all that we perceive.
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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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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.
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It is not beauty that endears, it's love that makes us see beauty.
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Music is love in search of a voice.
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One can no more approach people without love than one can approach bees without care. Such is the quality of bees.
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There is only one time that is important -- NOW! It is the most important time because it is the only time hat we have any power.
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Both salvation and punishment for man lie in the fact that if he lives wrongly he can befog himself so as not to see the misery of his position.
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Each time of life has its own kind of love.
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For if we allow that human life is always guided by reason, we destroy the premise that life is possible at all.
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Wrong does not cease to be wrong because the majority share in it.
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It's hard to love a woman and do anything.
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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.
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It is horrible! It is not the suffering and the death of the animals that is horrible, but the fact that the man without any need for so doing crushes his lofty feeling of sympathy and mercy for living creatures and does violence to himself that he may be cruel. The first element of moral life is abstinence.
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Conceit is incompatible with understanding.
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Eating meat is a leftover of the greatest brutality [killing] the transition to vegetarianism is the first and most natural consequence of enlightenment.
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To destroy governmental violence, only one thing is needed: It is that people should understand that the feeling of patriotism, which alone supports that instrument of violence, is a rude, harmful, disgraceful, and bad feeling, and, above all, is immoral.
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And once he had seen this, he could never again see it otherwise, just as we cannot reconstruct an illusion once it has been explained.
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Too much polishing and you spoil things. There's a limit to the expressibility of ideas. You have a new thought, an interesting one. Then, as you try to perfect it, it ceases to be new and interesting, and loses the freshness with which it first occurred to you. You're spoiling it.
Leo Tolstoy