"When you love someone, you love the person as they are, and not as you'd like them to be."
"If people lacked the capacity to receive the thoughts of the men who preceded them and to pass on to others their own thoughts, men would be like wild beasts. And if men lacked this other capacity of being infected by art, people would be almost more savage still, and, above all, more separated from and more hostile to one another. Therefore the activity of art is a most important one, as important as the activity of speech itself and as generally diffused."
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Source: Leo Nikolayevich Tolstoy, Leo Tolstoy (2007). “Twenty-Three Tales”, p.254, Cosimo, Inc.
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