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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
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Lev Nikolaevich
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Лев Николаевич
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The government in which I believe is that which is based on mere moral sanction...the real law lives in the kindness of our hearts. If our hearts are empty, no law or political reform can fill them.
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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.
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In the spiritual realm nothing is indifferent: what is not useful is harmful.
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I have now understood that though it seems to men that they live by care for themselves, in truth it is love alone by which they live. He who has love, is in God, and God is in him, for God is love.
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Everything intelligent is so boring.
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The role of the disappointed lover of a maiden or of any single woman might be ridiculous but the role of a man who was pursuing a married woman, and who made it the purpose of his life at all cost to draw her into adultery, was one which had in it something beautiful and dignified and could never be ridiculous.
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A person who has spoiled his stomach will criticize his meal saying that the food is bad the same thing happens with people who are not satisfied with their lives
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Often a man goes on for years imaging that the religious teaching that had been imparted to him since childhood is still intact, while all the time there is not a trace of it left in him.
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No one is satisfied with his position, but every one is satisfied with his wit
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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.
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The religious superstition is encouraged by means of the institution of churches, processions, monuments, festivities....The so-called clergy stupefy the masses....They befog the people and keep them in an eternal condition of stupefaction.
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All happy families resemble one another, each unhappy family is unhappy in its own way.
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Everything comes in time to him who knows how to wait. There is nothing stronger than those two: patience and time, they will do it all.
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And you know, there's less charm in life when you think about death--but it's more peaceful.
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You can love a person dear to you with a human love, but an enemy can only be loved with divine love.
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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.
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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.
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Vegetarianism serves as the criterion by which we know that the pursuit of moral perfection on the part of humanity is genuine and sincere.
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As we live through thousands of dreams in our present life, so is our present life only one of many thousands of such lives which we enter from the other more real life and then return after death. Our life is but one of the dreams of that more real life, and so it is endlessly, until the very last one, the very real the life of God.
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In the best, the friendliest and simplest relations flattery or praise is necessary, just as grease is necessary to keep wheels turning.
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