"War is not a polite recreation but the vilest thing in life, and we ought to understand that and not play at war."
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Quote collection
Leo Tolstoy quotes (page 26 of 42)
824 quotes — follow a thought to its full quote page.
"Loving the same man or woman all your life, why, that's like supposing the same candle could last you all your life"
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"Even if the absence of government really did mean anarchy in a negative, disorderly sense - which is far from being the case - even then, no anarchical disorder could be worse than the position to which government has led humanity."
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"She was in that highly-wrought state when the reasoning powers act with great rapidity: the state a man is in before a battle or a struggle, in danger, and at the decisive moments of life - those moments when a man shows once and for all what he is worth, that his past was not lived in vain but was a preparation for these moments."
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"Man has received direct from God only one instrument wherewith to know himself and to know his relation to the universe--he has no other--and that instrument is reason."
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"Go take the mother's soul, and learn three truths: Learn What dwells in man, What is not given to man , and What men live by . When thou hast learnt these things, thou shalt return to heaven."
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"And yet, now that years have passed, I recall it and wonder that it could distress me so much. It will be the same thing, too, with this trouble. Time will go by and I shall not mind about this either."
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"But the peasants - how do the peasants die?"
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"In our day the feeling of patriotism is an unnatural, irrational, and harmful feeling, and a cause of a great part of the ills from which mankind is suffering, and that, consequently, this feeling - should not be cultivated, as is now being done, but should, on the contrary, be suppressed and eradicated by all means available to rational men."
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"India, which is the nursery of the great faiths of the world"
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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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"Mathematics is the queen of disciplines.... it will drive the nonsense out of your head!"
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"The difference between real material poison and intellectual poison is that most material poison is disgusting to the taste, but intellectual poison, which takes the form of cheap newspapers or bad books, can unfortunately sometimes be attractive."
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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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"The true office of any faith is to give life a meaning which death cannot destroy."
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"Effort is not a means to lead us to happiness. Effort itself is happiness"
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"To know God and to live is the same thing. God is Life."
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"There is no genius where there is not simplicity."
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"I looked more widely around me, I studied the lives of the masses of humanity, and I saw that, not two or three, or ten, but hundreds, thousands, millions, had so understood the meaning of life that they were able both to live and to die. All these people were well acquainted with the meaning of life and death, quietly labored, endured privation and suffering, lived and died, and saw in all this, not a vain, but a good thing."
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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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