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Our whole life is taken up with anxiety for personal security, with preparations for living, so that we really never live at all.

Leo Tolstoy

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Leo Tolstoy
Age: 82 †
Born: 1828
Born: January 1
Died: 1910
Died: January 1
Diarist
Esperantist
Essayist
Novelist
Opinion Journalist
Pedagogue
Philosopher
Playwright
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Writer
Tolstoi
Tolstoy
Lev Nikolaevich
graf Tolstoĭ
Lev Nikolayevich
Count Tolstoy
Count Lev Tolstoy
Leo
graf Tolstoy
Lev
Count Tolstoy
Lev
graf Tolsztoj
Лев Николаевич
c граф Толстой
Lew
graf Tolstoi
Lev Nikolaevich Tolstoy
Lev Tolstoy
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Taken
Living
Live
Whole
Preparations
Really
Preparation
Never
Anxiety
Life
Personal
Security

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One may say with one's lips: “I believe that the world was created six thousand years ago” or, “I believe that Jesus flew away into the skies and is sitting on the right hand of the Father” or, “God is One, and also Three” — but no one can believe it, because the words have no sense.
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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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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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It seems that it is impossible to live without discovering the purpose of your life. And the first thing which a person should do is to understand the meaning of life. But the majority of people who consider themselves to be educated are proud that they have reached such great height that they cease to care about the meaning of existence.
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Knowledge is real knowledge only when it is acquired by the efforts of your intellect, not by memory
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Here's my advice to you: don't marry until you can tell yourself that you've done all you could, and until you've stopped loving the women you've chosen, until you see her clearly, otherwise you'll be cruelly and irremediably mistaken. Marry when you're old and good for nothing...Otherwise all that's good and lofty in you will be lost.
Leo Tolstoy
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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.
Leo Tolstoy
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I imagine, joking apart, that to know love, one must make mistakes and then correct them.
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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.
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Conceit is incompatible with understanding.
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There is no significant idea which cannot be explained to an intelligent twelve year old boy in fifteen minutes.
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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.
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The key to success in life is using the good thoughts of wise people.
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Violence produces only something resembling justice, but it distances people from the possibility of living justly, without violence.
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The ideas of the wise have been tested by centuries. Everything medium is lost and only original, deep and useful things are left.
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Better to know a few things which are good and necessary than many things which are useless and mediocre
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Faith is the sense of life, that sense by virtue of which man does not destroy himself, but continues to live on. It is the force whereby we live.
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Beautiful as seemed mama's face, it became more lovely when she smiled and seemed to enliven everything about her.
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In spite the mountains of books written about art, no precise definition of art has been constructed. And the reason for this is that the conception of art has been based on the conception of beauty.
Leo Tolstoy