"In life, in true life, there can be nothing better than what is. Wanting something different than what is, is blasphemy."
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Leo Tolstoy quotes (page 29 of 42)
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"What is important is not the length of life, but the depth of life. What is important is not to make life longer, but to take your soul out of time, as every sublime act does."
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"The best thoughts most often come in the morning after waking, while still in bed or while walking."
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"History is the product of vast, amorphous and indecipherable social movements."
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"Under the influence of music, it seems that I feel what I do not really feel, that I understand what I do not understand, that I do what I cannot do."
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"But that's just the aim of civilization - to make everything a source of enjoyment."
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"He was afraid of defiling the love which filled his soul."
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"My principal sin is doubt. I doubt everything, and am in doubt most of the time."
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"I feel not only that I cannot disappear, as nothing disappears in the world, but that I will always be and have always been. I feel that, besides me, above me, spirits live, and that in this world there is truth."
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"The highest wisdom has but one science-the science of the whole-the science explaining the whole creation and man's place in it."
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"Music makes me forget myself, my true condition, it carries me off into another state of being, one that isn't my own: under the influence of music I have the illusion of feeling things I don't really feel, of understanding things I don't understand, being able to do things I'm not able to do... Can it really be allowable for anyone who feels like it to hypnotize another person, or many other persons, and then do what he likes with them? Particularly if the hypnotist is the first unscrupulous individual who happens to come along?"
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"Well, pray if you like, only you'd do better to use your judgment."
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"Every revolution by force only puts more violent means of enslavement into the hands of the persons in power."
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"Only those live who do good."
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"The government in which I believe is that which is based on mere moral sanction...the real law lives in the kindness of our hearts. If our hearts are empty, no law or political reform can fill them."
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"No one has yet added up all the heavy, stress-filled workdays as well as the hundreds, perhaps thousands, of lives that are wasted to produce the world's amusements. It is for this reason that "amusements" are not so amusing."
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"The artist's mission must not be to produce an irrefutable solution to a problem, but to compel us to love life in all its countless and inexhaustible manifestations."
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"But that had been grief--this was joy. Yet that grief and this joy were alike outside all the ordinary conditions of life; they were loopholes, as it were, in that ordinary life through which there came glimpses of something sublime. And in the contemplation of this sublime something the soul was exalted to inconceivable heights of which it had before had no conception, while reason lagged behind, unable to keep up with it."
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"The chief cause of unhappiness in married life is that people think that marriage is sex attraction, which takes the form of promises and hopes and happiness - a view supported by public opinion and by literature. But marriage cannot cause happiness. Instead, it is always torture, which man has to pay for satisfying his sex urge."
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"The compassionate are not rich; therefore, the rich are not compassionate."
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