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…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.

Leo Tolstoy

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Leo Tolstoy
Age: 82 †
Born: 1828
Born: January 1
Died: 1910
Died: January 1
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Лев Николаевич
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More quotes by Leo Tolstoy

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People look like rivers very much: water is everywhere the same, but the rivers are narrow, fast, wide, pure, cold, muddy and warm. The people are the same. They have the rudiment of every human habit in them and they behave according to them. Sometimes they even do not look like themselves, but they still stay whatever they are.
Leo Tolstoy
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Men are so accustomed to maintaining external order by violence that they cannot conceive of life being possible without violence.
Leo Tolstoy
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What doubt can you have of the Creator when you behold His creation?... Who has decked the heavenly firmament with its stars? Who has clothed the earth in its beauty? How could it be without the creator?
Leo Tolstoy
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Conceit is incompatible with understanding.
Leo Tolstoy
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In spite of death, he felt the need of life and love. He felt that love saved him from despair, and that this love, under the menace of despair, had become still stronger and purer. The one mystery of death, still unsolved, had scarcely passed before his eyes, when another mystery had arisen, as insoluble, urging him to love and to life.
Leo Tolstoy
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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.
Leo Tolstoy
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He who has a mistaken idea of life, will always have a mistaken idea of death.
Leo Tolstoy
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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.
Leo Tolstoy
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Konstantin Levin did not like talking and hearing about the beauty of nature. Words for him took away the beauty of what he saw.
Leo Tolstoy
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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.
Leo Tolstoy
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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
Leo Tolstoy
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If we would only testify to the truth as we see it, it would turn out that there are hundreds, thousands, even millions of other people just as we are, who see the truth as we do...and are only waiting, again as we are, for someone to proclaim it. The Kingdom of God is within you.
Leo Tolstoy
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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.
Leo Tolstoy
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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.
Leo Tolstoy
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Why should I live? Why should I do anything? Is there in life any purpose which the inevitable death that awaits me does not undo and destroy?
Leo Tolstoy
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All the true heroes of history will be forgotten and all the villains will be remembered as heroes.
Leo Tolstoy
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There is nothing more harmful to you than improving only your material, animal side of life. There is nothing more beneficial, both for you and for others, than activity directed to the improvement of your soul.
Leo Tolstoy
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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.
Leo Tolstoy
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I feel that I am entitled to my share of lightheartedness and there is nothing wrong with enjoying one's self simply, like a boy.
Leo Tolstoy
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Music is love in search of a voice.
Leo Tolstoy