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c787b4c
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I ask one thing only: I ask for the right to hope, to suffer as I do. But if even that cannot be, command me to disappear, and I disappear. You shall not see me if my presence is distasteful to you.
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Leo Tolstoy |
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14dea48
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Smiling with pleasure, they went through their memories, not sad, old people's memories, but poetic, youthful ones, those impressions from the very distant past where dream merges with reality, and they laughed softly, rejoicing at something.
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Leo Tolstoy |
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3878dee
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How often we sin, how much we deceive, and all for what?... All will end in death, all!
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Leo Tolstoy |
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298b221
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I felt that what I had been standing on had collapsed and that I had nothing left under my feet. What I had lived on no longer existed, and there was nothing left. My life came to a standstill. I could breathe, eat, drink, and sleep, and I could not help doing these things; but there was no life, for there were no wishes the fulfillment of which I could consider reasonable. If I desired anything, I knew in advance that whether I satisfied m..
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Leo Tolstoy |
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4d15d4a
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Each man lives for himself, uses his freedom to achieve his personal goals, and feels with his whole being that right now he can or cannot do such-and-such an action; but as soon as he does it, this action, committed at a certain moment in time, becomes irreversible, and makes itself the property of history, in which is has not a free but a predestined significance.
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freedom
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Leo Tolstoy |
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f5927c8
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I think that to find out what love is really like, one must first make a mistake and then put it right.
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love
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Leo Tolstoy |
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7293066
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The study was slowly lit up as the candle was brought in. The familiar details came out: the stag's horns, the bookshelves, the looking-glass, the stove with its ventilator, which had long wanted mending, his father's sofa, a large table, on the table an open book, a broken ash-tray, a manuscript-book with his handwriting. As he saw all this, there came over him for an instant a doubt of the possibility of arranging this new life, of which ..
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Leo Tolstoy |
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2b21a30
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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 |
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10ac530
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It's like scarlet fever: one has to get it over." "Then one should invent a way of inoculating love, like vaccination."
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Leo Tolstoy |
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40aff7b
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I did not myself know what I wanted: I feared life, desired to escape from it, yet still hoped something of it.
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Leo Tolstoy |
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de267d1
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the more he did nothing, the less time he had to do anything.
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truth
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Leo Tolstoy |
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0fece7c
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The most mentally deranged people are certainly those who see in others indications of insanity they do not notice in themselves.
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Leo Tolstoy |
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e501cc3
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You think that your laws correct evil - they only increase it. There is but one way to end evil - by rendering good for evil to all men without distinction.
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good-and-evil
christianity
jesus
jesus-christ
laws
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Leo Tolstoy |
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9a86e43
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Death is finished, he said to himself. It is no more!
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Leo Tolstoy |
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c64cff2
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I don't give a damn unless I'm fond of a person;but I'd sacrifice my life for those I am fond of; the rest I'd throttle if they stood in my way...And you may not believe me but if I still set a value on life it is only because I still hope one day to meet such a heavenly creature who will regenarate me, purify me and elevate me. But you don't understand that.
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Leo Tolstoy |
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b6bbf6c
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Art is not, as the metaphysicians say, the manifestation of some mysterious idea of beauty or God; it is not, as the aesthetical physiologists say, a game in which man lets off his excess of stored-up energy; it is not the expression of man's emotions by external signs; it is not the production of pleasing objects; and, above all, it is not pleasure; but it is a means of union among men, joining them together in the same feelings, and indis..
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Leo Tolstoy |
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58adb3d
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There was no solution, save that universal solution which life gives to all questions, even the most complex and insolvable: One must live in the needs of the day--that is, forget oneself.
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Leo Tolstoy |
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f6c79f7
|
I wanted movement and not a calm course of existence. I wanted excitement and the chance to sacrifice myself for my love. I felt it in myself a superabundance of energy which found no outlet in our quiet life.
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inspirational-life
philosophy
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Leo Tolstoy |
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32b6a6f
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Without the support from religion--remember, we talked about it--no father, using only his own resources, would be able to bring up a child.
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religion
parenting
children
father
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Leo Tolstoy |
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d7467bc
|
Without knowledge of what I am and why I am here, it is impossible to live, and since I cannot know that, I cannot live either. In an infinity of time, in an infinity of matter, and an infinity of space a bubble-organism emerges while will exist for a little time and then burst, and that bubble am I.
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life
philosophy
knowledge
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Leo Tolstoy |
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eff9845
|
We have a criminal jury system which is superior to any in the world and it's efficiency is only marred by the difficulty of finding twelve men every day who don't know anything and can't read-
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Mark Twain Leo Tolstoy jane austen CHARLES DICKENS Victor Hugo |
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8e3d201
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excuse me' he added, taking the opera glasses out of her hands and looking over her bare shoulder at the row of boxes opposite, 'i'm afraid i'm becoming ridiculous
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Leo Tolstoy |
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f70ee3b
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But our idea is that the wolves should be fed and the sheep kept safe.
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Leo Tolstoy |
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05d3c64
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Love hinders death. Love is life. All, everything that I understand, I understand because I love. Everything is united by it alone. Love is God, and to die means that I, a particle of love, shall return to the general and eternal source." These thoughts seemed to him comforting. But they were only thoughts. Something was lacking in them, they were not clear, they were too one-sidedly personal and brain-spun. And there was the former agitati..
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Leo Tolstoy |
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83d0efe
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Everything was made bright by her. She was the smile that shed light all around her.
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romance
tolstoy
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Leo Tolstoy |
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31ec1b1
|
But the older he grew and the more intimately he came to know his brother, the oftener the thought occurred to him that the power of working for the general welfare - a power of which he felt himself entirely destitute - was not a virtue but rather a lack of something: not a lack of kindly honesty and noble desires and tastes, but a lack of the power of living, of what is called heart - the aspiration which makes a man choose one out of all..
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russian-literature
romances
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Leo Tolstoy |
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a042b11
|
Having then for the first time clearly understood that before every man, and before himself, there lay only suffering, death, and eternal oblivion, he had concluded that to live under such conditions was impossible; that one must either explain life to oneself so that it does not seem to be an evil mockery by some sort of devil, or one must shoot oneself.
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Leo Tolstoy |
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a324570
|
The whole trouble lies in that people think that there are conditions excluding the necessity of love in their intercourse with man, but such conditions do not exist. Things may be treated without love; one may chop wood, make bricks, forge iron without love, but one can no more deal with people without love than one can handle bees without care.
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Leo Tolstoy |
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33708b7
|
Involuntarily it appeared to me that there, somewhere, was someone who amused himself by watching how I lived for thirty or forty years: learning, developing, maturing in body and mind, and how, having with matured mental powers reached the summit of life from which it all lay before me, I stood on that summit -- like an arch-fool -- seeing clearly that there is nothing in life, and that there has been and will be nothing. And he was amused..
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Leo Tolstoy |
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22a3df5
|
A man's every action is inevitably conditioned by what surrounds him and by his own body.
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humanity
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Leo Tolstoy |
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96f4eb8
|
A wound in the soul, coming from the rending of the spiritual body, strange as it may seem, gradually closes like a physical wound. And once a deep wound heals over and the edges seem to have knit, a wound in the soul, like a physical wound, can be healed only by the force of life pushing up from inside. This was the way Natasha's wound healed. She thought her life was over. But suddenly her love for her mother showed her that the essence o..
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Leo Tolstoy |
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e9990ab
|
It's not so much that he can't fall in love, but he has not the weakness necessary.
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Leo Tolstoy |
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4e6aaf9
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These loaves, pigeons, and two little boys seemed unearthly. It all happened at the same time: a little boy ran over to a pigeon, glancing over at Levin with a smile; the pigeon flapped its wings and fluttered, gleaming in the sunshine among the snowdust quivering in the air, while the smell of freshly baked bread was wafted out of a little window as the loaves were put out. All this together was so extraordinarily wonderful that Levin burs..
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Leo Tolstoy |
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48d2f53
|
but my life now, my whole life apart from anything that can happen to me, every minute of it is no more meaningless, as it was before, but it has the positive meaning of goodness, which I have the power to put into it.
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Leo Tolstoy |
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a19b84c
|
And he has to live like this on the edge of destruction, alone, with nobody at all to understand or pity him
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Leo Tolstoy |
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78470f8
|
With friends, one is well; but at home, one is better.
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home
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Leo Tolstoy |
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2b6d84d
|
A free thinker used to be a man who had been educated on ideas of religion, law, morality, and had arrived at free thought by virtue of his own struggle and toil; but now a new type of born freethinker has been appearing, who've never even heard that there have been laws of morality and religion, and that there are authorities, but who simply grow up with negative ideas about everything, that is savages.
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Leo Tolstoy |
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0ab7e72
|
They ought to find out how to vaccinate for love, like smallpox.
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marriage
relationships
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Leo Tolstoy |
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e27072f
|
I felt a wish never to leave that room - a wish that dawn might never come, that my present frame of mind might never change.
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literature
leo-tolstoy
russia
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Leo Tolstoy |
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71f6b7e
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I'm getting old, that's the thing! What's in me now won't be there anymore.
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Leo Tolstoy |
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958b0f8
|
There is one thing, and only one thing, in which it is granted to you to be free in life, all else being beyond your power: that is to recognize and profess the truth.
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Leo Tolstoy |
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136b1ff
|
There are such repulsive faces in the world.
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mankind
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Leo Tolstoy |
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2d16eb7
|
No one is satisfied with his position, but every one is satisfied with his wit
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Leo Tolstoy |
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d59d736
|
I'll tell you truly: I value my thought and work terribly, but in essence - think about it - this whole world of ours is just a bit of mildew that grew over a tiny planet. And we think we can have something great - thoughts, deeds! They're all grains of sand
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Leo Tolstoy |