"A Gentleman is a man who will pay his gambling debts even when he knows he has been cheated."
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Leo Tolstoy quotes (page 10 of 42)
824 quotes — follow a thought to its full quote page.
"Life is everything. Life is God. Everything shifts and moves, and this movement is God. And while there is life, there is delight in the self-awareness of the divinity. To love life is to love God. The hardest and most blissful thing is to love this life in one's suffering, in the guiltlessness of suffering."
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"Our body is a machine for living. It is organized for that, it is its nature. Let life go on in it unhindered and let it defend itself."
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"Progress consists only in the greater clarification of answers to the basic questions of life."
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"As long as there are slaughterhouses there will be battlefields. A vegetarian diet is the acid test of humanitarianism."
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"All governments are in equal measure good and evil. The best ideal is anarchy."
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"The improvement of life was only accomplished to the extent to which it was based on a change of consciousness, that is, to the extent to which the law of violence was replaced in men's consciousness by the law of love."
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"The best generals I have known were... stupid or absent-minded men. Not only does a good army commander not need any special qualities, on the contrary he needs the absence of the highest and best human attributes - love, poetry, tenderness, and philosophic inquiring doubt. He should be limited, firmly convinced that what he is doing is very important (otherwise he will not have sufficient patience), and only then will he be a brave leader. God forbid that he should be humane, should love, or pity, or think of what is just and unjust."
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"it's much better to do good in a way that no one knows anything about it."
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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."
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"But Christ could certainly not have established the Church. That is, the institution we now call by that name, for nothing resembling our present conception of the Church-with its sacraments, its hierarchy, and especially its claim to infallibility-is to be found in Christ's words or in the conception of the men of his time."
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"Pure and complete sorrow is as impossible as pure and complete joy."
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"Talent is the capacity to direct concentrated attention upon the subject: "the gift of seeing what others have not seen."
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"When it is impossible to stretch the very elastic threads of historical ratiocination any farther, when actions are clearly contrary to all that humanity calls right or even just, the historians produce a saving conception of 'greatness.' 'Greatness,' it seems, excludes the standards of right and wrong. For the 'great' man nothing is wrong, there is no atrocity for which a 'great' man can be blamed."
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"Every man and every living creature has a sacred right to the gladness of springtime."
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"The life of our class, of the wealthy and the learned, was not only repulsive to me but had lost all meaning. The sum of our action and thinking, of our science and art, all of it struck me as the overindulgences of a spoiled child."
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"Happiness does not depend on outward things, but on the way we see them."
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"If goodness has causes, it is not goodness; if it has effects, a reward, it is not goodness either. So goodness is outside the chain of cause and effect."
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"There can be only one permanent revolution- a moral one: the regeneration of the inner man."
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"I can't understand how anyone can write without rewriting everything over and over again."
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