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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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Leo Tolstoy
Age: 82 †
Born: 1828
Born: January 1
Died: 1910
Died: January 1
Diarist
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Opinion Journalist
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Lev Nikolaevich
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Лев Николаевич
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More quotes by Leo Tolstoy

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Man by violating his own feelings becomes cruel. And how deeply seated in the human heart is the injunction not to take life.
Leo Tolstoy
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They ought to find out how to vaccinate for love, like smallpox.
Leo Tolstoy
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… for nightinggales - we know - can’t live on fairytales.
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Just as a painter needs light in order to put the finishing touches to his picture, so I need an inner light, which I feel I never have enough of in the autumn.
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War is not courtesy but the most horrible thing in life and we ought to understand that, and not play at war. We ought to accept this terrible necessity sternly and seriously. It all lies in that: get rid of falsehood and let war be war and not a game.
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The possibility of killing one's self is a safety valve. Having it, man has no right to say life is unbearable.
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People understand the meaning of eating lies in the nourishment of the body only when they cease to consider that the object of that activity is pleasure. ...People understand the meaning of art only when they cease to consider that the aim of that activity is beauty, i.e., pleasure.
Leo Tolstoy
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Whatever question arose, a swarm of these drones, without having finished their buzzing on a previous theme, flew over to the new one and by their hum drowned and obscured the voices of those who were disputing honestly.
Leo Tolstoy
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The greater the state, the more wrong and cruel its patriotism, and the greater is the sum of suffering upon which its power is founded.
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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I must write each day without fail, not so much for the success of the work, as in order not to get out of my routine.
Leo Tolstoy
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Every reform by violence is to be deprecated, because it does little to correct the evil while men remain as they are, and because wisdom has no need of violence.
Leo Tolstoy
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I have discovered nothing. I have only found out what I knew. I understand the force that in the past gave me life, and now too gives me life. I have been set free from falsity, I have found the Master.
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The question was a fashionable one, whether a definite line exists between psychological and physiological phenomena in human activity and if so, where it lies?
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Everything comes in time to him who knows how to wait.
Leo Tolstoy
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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.
Leo Tolstoy
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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.
Leo Tolstoy
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God forgive me everything!' she said, feeling the impossibility of struggling.
Leo Tolstoy
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Pierre was right when he said that one must believe in the possibility of happiness in order to be happy, and I now believe in it. Let the dead bury the dead, but while I'm alive, I must live and be happy.
Leo Tolstoy
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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.
Leo Tolstoy