Leo Tolstoy Quotes - Page 3

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.

If you want to be happy, be.

Man cannot possess anything as long as he fears death. But to him who does not fear it, everything belongs. If there was no suffering, man would not know his limits, would not know himself.

A battle is won by him who is firmly resolved to win it.

To tell the truth is very difficult, and young people are rarely capable of it.

And where love ends, hate begins

Every man had his personal habits, passions, and impulses toward goodness, beauty, and truth.

Loving the same man or woman all your life, why, that's like supposing the same candle could last you all your life

If only [people] understood that every thought is both false and true! False by one-sidenedness resulting from man's inability to embrace the whole truth, and true as an expression of one fact of human endeavor.

No one can attain to truth by himself. Only by laying stone on stone with the cooperation of all, by the millions of generations from our forefather Adam to our own times, is that temple reared which is to be a worthy dwelling place of the Great God.

Este incredibil cât de completă este iluzia care ne face să credem că frumuseţea este în genere bunătate.

Without knowledge of what I am and why I am here, it is impossible to live, and since I cannot know that, I cannot live either. In an infinity of time, in an infinity of matter, and an infinity of space a bubble-organism emerges while will exist for a little time and then burst, and that bubble am I.

One must try to make one's life as pleasant as possible. I'm alive and it's not my fault, which means I must somehow go on living the best I can, without bothering anybody, until I die.'
'But what makes you live? With such thoughts, you'll sit without moving, without undertaking anything...'
'Life won't leave one alone as it is.

It is amazing how complete is the delusion that beauty is goodness.

We can know only that we know nothing. And that is the highest degree of human wisdom.

People of limited intelligence are fond of talking about "these days," imagining that they have discovered and appraised the peculiarities of "these days" and that human nature changes with the times.

truth, like gold, is to be obtained not by its growth, but by washing away from it all that is not gold.

He soon felt that the realization of his desire had given him only a grain of the mountain of happiness he had expected. It showed him the eternal error people make in imagining that happiness is the realization of desires.

Happiness consists in always aspiring perfection, the pause in any level in perfection is the pause of happiness

Then he thought himself unhappy, but happiness was all in the future; now he felt that the best happiness was already in the past.