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| Link | Quote | Stars | Tags | Author |
| c5e2853 | Every man experiences what you call love for every pretty woman and least of all for his wife. That is what the proverb says, and it is a true one. "Another's wife is a swan, but one's own is bitter wormwood." | Leo Tolstoy | ||
| 3f35c1a | I find it difficult now to recall and understand the dreams which then filled my imagination. Even when I can recall them, I find it hard to believe that my dreams were just like that: they were so strange and so remote from life. | Leo Tolstoy | ||
| d0afb2c | in marriage the great thing was love, and that with love one would always be happy, for happiness rests only on oneself. | Leo Tolstoy | ||
| 95943d8 | Then as now much time was spent arguing about the rights of women, husband-and-wife relationships and freedom and rights within marriage, but Natasha had no interest in any such questions. Questions like these, then as now, existed exclusively for people who see marriage only in terms of satisfaction given and received by the married couple, though this is only one principle of married life rather than its overall meaning, which lies in the.. | Leo Tolstoy | ||
| 11f7fdb | The scent of flowers grew stronger and came from all sides; the grass was drenched with dew; a nightingale struck up in a lilac bush close by and then stopped on hearing our voices; the starry sky seemed to come down lower over our heads. | Leo Tolstoy | ||
| 753ccf6 | I love everybody and pity everybody. | Leo Tolstoy | ||
| 068da29 | As soon as a young man advances toward a woman, directly he falls under the influence of this opium, and loses his head. Long ago I felt ill at ease when I saw a woman too well adorned,--whether a woman of the people with her red neckerchief and her looped skirt, or a woman of our own society in her ball-room dress. But now it simply terrifies me. I see in it a danger to men, something contrary to the laws; and I feel a desire to call a pol.. | Leo Tolstoy | ||
| c7dd436 | War is not courtesy but the most horrible thing in life; and we ought to understand that and not play at war. We ought to accept this terrible necessity sternly and seriously. It all lies in that: get rid of falsehood and let war be war and not a game. As it is now, war is the favorite pastime of the idle and frivolous. The military calling is the most highly honored. | Leo Tolstoy | ||
| 1fb285b | I've lost my heart to you. | Leo Tolstoy | ||
| 186c85c | But a man's relationship to the world is determined not just by his intellect but by his feelings and by his who aggregate of spiritual forces. However much one implies or explains to a person that all that truly exists is no more than an idea, or that everything is made up of atoms, or that the essence of life is substance or will, or that heat, light, movement and electricity are only manifestations of one and the same energy; however muc.. | Leo Tolstoy | ||
| bf41584 | The constant, obvious flattery, contrary to all evidence, of the people around him [Tsar Nicholas I] had brought him to the point that he no longer saw his contradictions, no longer conformed his actions and words to reality, logic, or even simple common sense, but was fully convinced that all his orders, however senseless, unjust, and inconsistent with each other, became sensible, just, and consistent with each other only because he gave t.. | narcissism self-delusion | Leo Tolstoy | |
| ce6d4d2 | What do you want? What do you want?" he repeated to himself. "What do I want? To live and not to suffer," he answered. And again he listened with such concentrated attention that even his pain did not distract him. "To live? How?" asked his inner voice. "Why, to live as I used to--well and pleasantly." "As you lived before, well and pleasantly?" the voice repeated. And in imagination he began to recall the best moments of his pleasant life... | Leo Tolstoy | ||
| 193f7f2 | No, you're not going to get away from us, and you're not going to be different, you're going to be the same as you've always been; with doubts, ever lasting dissatisfaction with yourself, vain efforts to improve, and failures, and continual expectations of happiness that has eluded you and that isn't possible for you. | Leo Tolstoy | ||
| f55708d | It was one of those things that one knows but cannot even tell oneself - so dreadful and shameful it would be to be mistaken. | Leo Tolstoy | ||
| f03b428 | Il ne faut jamais rien outrer: One must do nothing in excess | Leo Tolstoy | ||
| 42056c5 | I and all men have only one firm, incontestable, clear knowledge, and that knowledge cannot be explained by the reason--it is outside it, and has no causes and can have no effects. "If goodness has causes, it is not goodness; if it has effects, a reward, it is not goodness either. So goodness is outside the chain of cause and effect." | Leo Tolstoy | ||
| 4d396d9 | I've enough pride never to let myself love a man who does not love me. | pride unrequited-love | Leo Tolstoy | |
| 72ced9d | All the methods of appointing authorities that have been tried, divine right, and election, and heredity, and balloting, and assemblies and parliaments and senate--all have proved ineffectual. Everyone knows that not one of these methods attains the aim either of entrusting power only to the incorruptible, or of preventing power from being abused. Everyone knows on the contrary that men in authority--be they emperors, ministers, governors, .. | politics government-corruption authority government power | Leo Tolstoy | |
| 50c42bd | 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 Englishman is undoubtedly correct. An Italian is self-assured because he is excitable and easily forgets himself and other p.. | Leo Tolstoy | ||
| e742d52 | The truth is that the State is a conspiracy designed not only to exploit, but above all to corrupt its citizens ... Henceforth, I shall never serve any government anywhere. | Leo Tolstoy | ||
| 075b3c5 | And yet our existence is so organized that every personal enjoyment is purchased at the price of human suffering contrary to human nature. | Leo Tolstoy | ||
| 62a30d6 | Oh! How good it is to be your age! I remember, and I know that blue haze like the mist on the mountains of Switzerland. That mist which covers everything in that blissful time when childhood is just ending, and out of the vast circle, happy and gay, there is a path growing narrower and narrower, and it is delightful and alarming to enter the ballroom, bright and splendid as it is... | Leo Tolstoy | ||
| 82b2215 | A moment's pain can be a lifetime's gain. | Leo Tolstoy | ||
| 6800204 | Yes, it was real hatred - not the hatred we only read about in novels, which I do not believe in, hatred that is supposed to find satisfaction in doing some one harm - but the hatred that fills you with overpowering aversion for a person who, however, deserves your respect, yet whose hair, his neck, the way he walks, the sound of his voice, his whole person, his every gesture are repulsive to you, and at the same time some unaccountable for.. | youth tolstoy childhood | Leo Tolstoy | |
| c4b3f74 | You have a consistent character yourself and you wish all the facts of life to be consistent, but they never are. For instance you despise public service because you want work always to correspond to its aims, and that never happens. You also want the activity of each separate man to have an aim, and love and family life always to coincide--and that doesn't happen either. All the variety, charm and beauty of life are made up of light and sh.. | incongruity spectrum dissonance | Leo Tolstoy | |
| f7076aa | peoples who have been waiting for their independence for a century, fighting for it for a generation, can afford to sit out a presidential term, or a year or two in the life of an old man in a hurry; | Alistair Horne | ||
| c25cde3 | If you can't discover what's keeping you in, the will to get out soon becomes confused and ineffectual. | Daniel Quinn | ||
| 42c07f1 | A week ago," Ishmael said, "when we were talking about laws, you said that there's only one kind of law about how people should live--the kind that can be changed by a vote. What do you think now? Can the laws that govern competition in the community be changed by a vote?" "No. But they're not absolutes, like the laws of aerodynamics. They can be broken." "Can't the laws of aerodynamics be broken?" "No. If your plane isn't built according t.. | Daniel Quinn | ||
| 45978bb | Whenever a Taker couple talk about how wonderful it would be to have a big family, they're reenacting this scene behind the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil. They're saying to themselves, 'Of course it's our right to apportion life on this planet as we please. Why stop of four kids or six? We can have fifteen if we like. All we have to do is plow under another few hundres acres of rain forest -- and who cares if a dozen other species .. | Daniel Quinn | ||
| 065eb6e | It is in fact an orderly community. The green plants are food for the plant eaters, which are food for the predators, and some of those predators are food for still other predators. And what's left over is food for the scavengers, who return to the earth nutrients needed by the green plants. It's a system that has worked magnificently for billions of years. Filmmakers understandably love footage of gore and battle, but any naturalist will t.. | natural-order | Daniel Quinn | |
| 37ef6e5 | There is enormous pressure on you to take a place in the story your culture is enacting in the world-- any place at all. | Daniel Quinn | ||
| e0b50c0 | Why is it that no one is excited? I hear people talking in the laundromat about the end of the world, and they're no more excited than if they were comparing detergents. People talk about the destruction of the ozone layer and the death of all life. They talk about the devastation of the rainforests, about deadly pollution that will be with us for thousands and millions of years, about the disappearance of dozens of species of life every da.. | Daniel Quinn | ||
| 2545c22 | To each is given its moment in the blaze, its spark to be surrendered to another when it is sent, so that the blaze may go on. None may deny its spark to the general blaze and live forever. Each is sent to another someday. You are sent; you are on your way. I am sent. To the wolf or the lion or the vulture or the grasses, I am sent. My death is the life of another, and I will stand again in the windswept grasses and look through the eyes of.. | Daniel Quinn | ||
| 3afc4c9 | The creatures who act as though they belong to the world follow the peace-keeping law, and because they follow that law, they give the creatures around them a chance to grow toward whatever it's possible for them to become. That's how man came into being. The creatures around Australopithecus didn't imagine that the world belonged to them, so they let him live and grow. How does being civilized come into it? Does being civilized mean that y.. | Daniel Quinn | ||
| c0822d2 | Arts and disciplines of that kind are fundamentally selfish; they're all designed to benefit the pupil--not the world - "Ishmael" | Daniel Quinn | ||
| 1a73dc9 | One thing I know people will say to me is 'Are you suggesting we go back to being hunter-gatherers?'" "That of course is an inane idea," Ishmael said. "The Leaver life-style isn't about hunting and gathering, it's about letting the rest of the community live--and agriculturalists can do that as well as hunter-gatherers." | Daniel Quinn | ||
| 8a35e4b | We had been taken from The Wild and brought together in one place, because, for some strange reason, people found us interesting. | Daniel Quinn | ||
| 3238b94 | It has happened that a species has tried to live in violation of the Law of Limited Competition. Or rather it has happened one time, in one human culture--ours. That's what our agricultural revolution is all about. That's the whole point of totalitarian agriculture: We hunt our competitors down, we destroy their food, and we deny them access to food. That's what makes it totalitarian. | Daniel Quinn | ||
| 8fffbed | Yes?" "When you said you weren't angry..." "Yes?" "Were you?" "I was rather annoyed," he admitted. "But not angry?" She sounded as if she didn't believe him. "Believe me, Henry, when I get angry, you'll know." "What happens?" His eyes clouded over slightly before he answered. "You don't want to know." She believed him." | dunford | Julia Quinn | |
| 4a6200d | I would be pleased to participate in this conversation to a greater degree," he drawled, "except that you have not seen fit to share with me of the details of your life." "It was not an oversight on my part." He clucked disapprovingly. "So hostile." Her eyes bugged out. "You abducted me-" Coerced," he reminded her. "Do you me to hit you?" "I wouldn't mind it," he said mildly. "And besides, now that you're here, was it really so very ter.. | Julia Quinn | ||
| c5dd967 | You are a treasure, Iris Kenworthy, | Julia Quinn | ||
| dc39285 | Hush up, minx. You're a funny one, but you're certainly more likable than unlikable. | Julia Quinn | ||
| 5f599fb | Anthony Bridgerton hatradolt bor karosszekeben, elgondolkodva kortyolta a whiskyt; lotykolte, korbe aramoltatta a poharban, majd megszolalt: - Arra gondoltam, hogy megnosulok. Benedict Bridgerton, aki eppen azon szokasat gyakorolta, amit anyja annyira megvetett, nevezetesen szeket ket hatso labara billentve kisse kapatosan hintazott, erre lehuppant. Colin Bridgerton felrenyelt. Colin szerencsejere Benedict eppen idoben nyerte vissza egyensu.. | Julia Quinn | ||
| a1b0596 | I can't help but think that if she was going to kill herself, she might as well have done it earlier. Perhaps when I was a toddler. Or better yet, an infant. It certainly would have made my life easier. I asked my uncle Hugh (who is not really my uncle, but he is married to the stepsister of my current mother's brother's wife and he lives quite closeand he's a vicar) if I would be going to hell for such a thought. He said no, that frankly, .. | suicide irony fun | Julia Quinn |