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The subject of history is the life of peoples and of humanity. To catch and pin down in words--that is, to describe directly the life, not only of humanity, but even of a single people, appears to be impossible.

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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Essayist
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Opinion Journalist
Pedagogue
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Tolstoi
Tolstoy
Lev Nikolaevich
graf Tolstoĭ
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graf Tolstoy
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graf Tolsztoj
Лев Николаевич
c граф Толстой
Lew
graf Tolstoi
Lev Nikolaevich Tolstoy
Lev Tolstoy
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A wife's a worry, a non-wife's even worse.
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Every time I tried to express my most heartfelt desires to be morally good I met with contempt and ridicule and as soon as I would give in to vile passions I was praised and encouraged. Ambition, love of power, self-interest, lechery, pride, anger, vengeance-all of it was highly esteemed.
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I'll tell you truly: I value my thought and work terribly, but in essence - think about it - this whole world of ours is just a bit of mildew that grew over a tiny planet. And we think we can have something great - thoughts, deeds! They're all grains of sand
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It is very difficult to tell the truth.
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Men need only trust in Christ's teaching and obey it, and there will be peace on earth.
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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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The most important of all sciences man can and must learn is the science of living so as to do the least evil and the greatest possible good.
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Never did Christ utter a single word attesting to a personal resurrection and a life beyond the grave.
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Though the doctors treated him, let his blood, and gave him medications to drink, he nevertheless recovered.
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Childhood candor... shall I ever find you again?
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Men are so accustomed to maintaining external order by violence that they cannot conceive of life being possible without violence.
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One must be cunning and wicked in this world.
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If religion is the establishing of a relationship between man and the universe, then morality is the explanation of those activities that automatically result when a person maintains a relationship to the universe.
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Reason unites us, not only with our contemporaries, but with men who lived two thousand years before us, and with those who will live after us.
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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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I believe that the reason of life is for each of us simply to grow in love.
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A new conception of life cannot be imposed on men it can only be freely assimilated. And it can only be freely assimilated in two ways: one spiritual and internal, the other experimental and external.
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He had the unlucky capacity many men have of seeing and believing in the possibility of goodness and truth, but of seeing the evil and falsehood of life too clearly to take any serious part in it.
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Only people who are capable of loving strongly can also suffer great sorrow, but this same necessity of loving serves to counteract their grief and heals them.
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Christian love comes from the understanding that there is a unity of divine origins in oneself and in other people, and not only in people, but in all living things.
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