“Those whom God wishes to destroy he drives mad.”
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Leo Tolstoy
“But any acquisition that doesn't correspond to the labour expended is dishonest”
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Leo Tolstoy
“We are forced to fall back on fatalism as an explanation of irrational events (that is to say,
events the reasonableness of which we do not understand).”
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Leo Tolstoy
“Her face was brilliant and glowing; but this glow was not one of brightness; it suggested
the fearful glow of a conflagration in the midst of a dark night.”
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Leo Tolstoy
“The antagonism between life and conscience may be removed in two ways: by a change
of life or by a change of conscience.”
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Leo Tolstoy
“Never, never marry, my friend. Here’s my advice to you: don’t marry until you can tell
yourself that you’ve done all you could, and until you’ve stopped loving the woman you’ve
chosen, until you see her clearly, otherwise you’ll be cruelly and irremediably mistaken. Marry
when you’re old and good for nothing...Otherwise all that’s good and lofty in you will be lost.”
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Leo Tolstoy
“It's not those who are handsome we love, but those we love who are handsome.”
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Leo Tolstoy
“Then we should find some artificial inoculation against love, as with smallpox. ”
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Leo Tolstoy
“As the sun and each atom of ether is a shphere complete in itself, yet at the same time
only a part of a whole too vast for man to comprehend, so each individual bears within himself
his own purpose, yet bears it ot serve a general purpose unfathomable to man.”
―
Leo Tolstoy
“He stepped down, trying not to look long at her, as if she were the sun, yet he saw her, like
the sun, even without looking.”
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Leo Tolstoy
“In the morning he would sit down to work, finish his allotted task, then take the little lamp
from the hook, put it on the table, get his book from the shelf, open it, and sit down to read.
And the more he read, the more he understood, and the brighter and happier it grew in his
heart.”
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Leo Tolstoy
“Indeed, ask every man separately whether he thinks it laudable and worthy of a man of this
age to hold a position from which he receives a salary disproportionate to his work; to take
from the people--often in poverty--taxes to be spent on constructing cannon, torpedoes, and
other instruments of butchery, so as to make war on people with whom we wish to be atpeace, and who feel the same wish in regard to us; or to receive a salary for devoting one's
whole life to constructing these instruments of butchery, or to preparing oneself and others for
the work of murder.”
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Leo Tolstoy
“In historical events great men-so called-are but the labels that serve to give a mane to an
event, and like labels, they have the last possible connection with the event itself. Every action
of theirs, that seems to them an act of their own free will, is in an historical sense not free at
all, but in bondage to the whole course of previous history, and predestined from all eternity.”
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Leo Tolstoy
“They had to return to the one sure and never-failing resource- slander.”
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Leo Tolstoy