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| Link | Quote | Stars | Tags | Author |
| d836f70 | Well, listen a moment, Monsieur Mayor; I have often been severe in my life towards others. It was just. I did right. Now if I were not severe towards myself, all I have justly done would become injustice. Should I spare myself more than others? No. What! if I should be prompt only to punish others and not myself, I should be a wretched indeed! - Javert to M. Madeleine | truth justice | Victor Hugo | |
| d2c2a6e | The soul that loves and suffers is in the sublime state. | pain suffering love sublime soul | Victor Hugo | |
| a5eb5ca | At that moment of love, a moment when passion is absolutely silent under omnipotence of ecstasy, Marius, pure seraphic Marius, would have been more capable of visiting a woman of the streets than of raising Cosette's dress above the ankle. Once on a moonlit night, Cosette stopped to pick up something from the ground, her dress loosened and revealed the swelling of her breasts. Marius averted his eyes. | Victor Hugo | ||
| 3a95f92 | I repeat, whether we be Italians or Frenchmen, misery concerns us all. | humanity misery | Victor Hugo | |
| 0d8e46c | That evening, before he went to bed, he said again: "Let us never fear robbers nor murderers. Those are dangers from without, petty dangers. Let us fear ourselves. Prejudices are the real robbers; vices are the real murderers. The great dangers lie within ourselves. What matters it what threatens our head or our purse! Let us think only of that which threatens our soul." | Victor Hugo | ||
| 0e41dbf | Let us remark by the way, that to be blind and to be loved, is, in fact, one of the most strangely exquisite forms of happiness upon this earth, where nothing is complete. To have continually at one's side a woman, a daughter, a sister, a charming being, who is there because you need her and because she cannot do without you; to know that we are indispensable to a person who is necessary to us; to be able to incessantly measure one's affect.. | Victor Hugo | ||
| f78ca53 | What more could he need, this old man whose little leisure was divided between day-time gardening and night-time contemplation? Was not that narrow space with the sky its ceiling room enough for the worship of God in the most delicate of his works and in the most sublime? A garden to walk in and immensity to dream in -what more could he ask? A few flowers at his feet and above him the stars. | life inspirational | Victor Hugo | |
| 26a9f68 | Genuflection before the idol or the dollar destroys the muscles which walk and the will that moves. | greed | Victor Hugo | |
| db9f25b | Knowledge is a weight added to conscience. | Victor Hugo | ||
| 0f634e3 | Aimer ou avoir aimee, cela suffit. Ne demandez rien ensuite. On n'a pas d'autre perle a trouver dans les plis tenebreux de la vie. Aimer est un accomplissement. | Victor Hugo | ||
| 6886da9 | The bureau is closed, said Gavroche. I'm receiving no more complaints. | Victor Hugo | ||
| 15d0cd0 | Then, with the barricades complete, the posts assigned, the muskets loaded, the lookouts placed, alone in these fearful streets in which there were now no pedestrians, surrounded by these dumb, and seemingly dead houses, which throbbed with no human motion, wrapped in the deepening shadows of the twilight, which was beginning to fall, in the midst of this obscurity and silence, through which they felt the advance of something inexpressibly .. | Victor Hugo | ||
| fa8f438 | Yes, there is something in me hateful, repulsive," thought Ljewin, as he came away from the Schtscherbazkijs', and walked in the direction of his brother's lodgings. "And I don't get on with other people. Pride, they say. No, I have no pride. If I had any pride, I should not have put myself in such a position"." | marriage love ljewin levin pride | Leo Tolstoy | |
| ee2bc0c | It was as if the main screw in his head, which held his whole life together, had become stripped. The screw would not go in, would not come out, but turned in the same groove without catching hold, and it was impossible to stop turning it. | psychology | Leo Tolstoy | |
| b6a06fb | Anna had the faculty of blushing. | Leo Tolstoy | ||
| be2b4ae | the children themselves repaid her griefs with small joys. These joys were so small that they could not be seen, like gold in the sand, and in her bad moments she saw only the griefs, only sand; but there were also good moments, when she saw only joys, only gold. | Leo Tolstoy | ||
| a46ccb8 | The heroine of my writings is She, whom I love with all the forces of my being, She who always was, is and will be beautiful, is Truth | Leo Tolstoy | ||
| e17e3bb | It seems to me that what we call beauty in a face lies in the smile: if the smile heightens the charm of the face, the face is a beautiful one; if it does not alter it, the face is ordinary, and if it is spoilt by a smile, it is ugly. | youth boyhood face tolstoy smile childhood | Leo Tolstoy | |
| 0b23f91 | Drops Dripped. Quiet talk went on. Horses neighed and scuffled. Someone snored. | Leo Tolstoy | ||
| 7246584 | Pure, perfect sorrow is as impossible as pure and perfect joy. | Leo Tolstoy | ||
| 4fcf687 | There are two sides to the life of every man, his individual life which is the more free the more abstract it's interests, and his elemental swarm-life in which he inevitably obeys laws laid down for him | Leo Tolstoy | ||
| 62dcdba | Germans are self-confident on the basis of an abstract notion--science, that is, the supposed knowledge of absolute truth. A Frenchman is self-assured because he regards himself personally, both in mind and body, as irresistibly attractive to men and women. An Englishman is self-assured, as being a citizen of the best-organized state in the world, and therefore as an Englishman always knows what he should do and knows that all he does as an.. | Leo Tolstoy | ||
| eed1242 | As though I had been going steadily downhill, imagining that I was going uphill. So it was in fact. In public opinion I was going uphill, and steadily as I got up it, life was ebbing away from me....And now the work's done, there's only death. | Leo Tolstoy | ||
| 438a7ae | If you could forget and forgive what happened." He snatched the chalk with nervous, trembling fingers, and breaking it, wrote the initial letters of the following phrase, "I have nothing to forget and to forgive; I have never ceased to love you." | Leo Tolstoy | ||
| f76734f | Satan can never be driven out by Satan. Error can never be corrected by error, and evil cannot be vanquished by evil. | Leo Tolstoy | ||
| cabce9e | As a house can be only be built satisfactorily and durably when there is a foundation, and a picture can be painted only when there is something prepared to paint it on, so carnal love is only legitimate, reasonable, and lasting when it is based on the respect and love of one human being for another. | sex marriage christianity love christian-marriage | Leo Tolstoy | |
| dde3f2e | In affirming my belief in Christ's teaching, I could not help explaining why I do not believe, and consider as mistaken, the Church's doctrine, which is usually called Christianity. | Leo Tolstoy | ||
| 9f7f896 | But she did not take her eyes from the wheels of the second car. And exactly at the moment when the midpoint between the wheels drew level with her, she threw away the red bag, and drawing her head back into her shoulders, fell on her hands under the car, and with a light movement, as though she would rise immediately, dropped on her knees. And at the instant she was terror-stricken at what she was doing. 'Where am I? What am I doing? What .. | Leo Tolstoy | ||
| 5e4abb1 | When in doubt, my dear fellow, do nothing. | Leo Tolstoy | ||
| 115f588 | He knew she was there by the rapture and the terror that seized on his heart. She was standing talking to a lady at the opposite end of the ground. There was apparently nothing striking either in her dress or her attitude. But for Levin she was as easy to find in that crowd as a rose among nettles. Everything was made bright by her. She was the smile that shed light on all round her. "Is it possible I can go over there on the ice, go up to .. | Leo Tolstoy | ||
| dea9926 | It was long before I could believe that human learning had no clear answer to this question. For a long time it seemed to me, as I listened to the gravity and seriousness wherewith Science affirmed its positions on matters unconnected with the problem of life, that I must have misunderstood something. For a long time I was timid in the presence in learning, and I fancied that the insufficiency of the answers which I received was not its fau.. | science questions | Leo Tolstoy | |
| 25396c8 | One must do one of two tings: either admit that the existing order of society is just, and then stick up for one's rights in it;or acknowledge that you are enjoying unjust privileges, as i do, and then enjoy them and be satisfied. | Leo Tolstoy | ||
| 072b317 | He was always in a hurry to get where he was not. | seeking | Leo Tolstoy | |
| 7fd647b | Between Countess Nordston and Levin there had been established those relations, not infrequent in society, in which two persons, while ostensibly remaining on friendly terms, are contemptuous of each other to such a degree that they cannot even treat each other seriously and cannot even insult each one another. | relationships contempt | Leo Tolstoy | |
| f5b6170 | In his Petersburg world people were divided into two quite opposite sorts. One--the inferior sort: the paltry, stupid, and, above all, ridiculous people who believe that a husband should live with the one wife to whom he is married, that a girl should be pure, a woman modest, and a man, manly, self controlled and firm; that one should bring up one's children to earn their living, should pay one's debts, and other nonsense of the kind. These.. | Leo Tolstoy | ||
| 32dee6b | I shall go on in the same way, losing my temper...there will be still the same wall between the holy of holies of my soul and other people...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. | Leo Tolstoy | ||
| 24c435c | A wife's a worry, a non-wife's even worse. | Leo Tolstoy | ||
| 65103aa | So it would be, were it not for the law of inertia, as immutable a force in men and nations as in inanimate bodies. In men it takes the form of the psychological principle, so truly expressed in the words of the Gospel, " They have loved darkness better than light, because their deeds were evil." This principle shows itself in men not trying to recognise the truth, but to persuade themselves that the life they are leading, which is what the.. | Leo Tolstoy | ||
| 9673d06 | the mere fact of the death of a near acquaintance aroused, as usual, in all who heard of it the complacent feeling that, "it is he who is dead and not I." -- | Leo Tolstoy | ||
| c53ef34 | As often happens between people who have chosen different ways, each of them, while rationally justifying the other's activity, despised it in his heart. To each of them it seemed that the life he led was the only real life, and the one his friend led was a mere illusion. | real-life perception-of-reality | Leo Tolstoy | |
| 24ce04d | Spring, love, happiness! Are you not weary of that stupid, meaningless, constantly repeated fraud? Always the same and always a fraud! There is no spring, no sun, no happiness! | world-weariness insignificance | Leo Tolstoy | |
| ee6cd1d | Pierre looked into the sky, into the depths of the retreating, twinkling stars. "And all this is mine, and all this is in me, and all this is me!" thought Pierre. "And all this they've caught and put in a shed and boarded it up!" | Leo Tolstoy | ||
| 2032214 | He meditated on the use to which he should put all the energy of youth which comes to a man only once in life. Should he devote this power, which is not the strength of intellect or heart or education, but an urge which once spent can never return, the power given to a man once only to make himself, or even - so it seems to him at the time - the universe into anything he wishes: should he devote it to art, to science, to love, or to practic.. | Leo Tolstoy | ||
| 95fea77 | It is the essence of certainty to be established only with reservations. | Maurice Merleau-Ponty |