1. If you make it a habit not to blame others, you will feel the growth of the ability to love in your soul, and you will see the growth of goodness in your life.

Leo Tolstoy

 

  1. Everyone thinks of changing the world, but no one thinks of changing himself.

Leo Tolstoy

 

  1. Wrong does not cease to be wrong because the majority share in it.

Leo Tolstoy

 

  1. Seize the moments of happiness, love and be loved! That is the only reality in the world, all else is folly.

Leo Tolstoy

 

  1. A man is like a fraction whose numerator is what he is and whose denominator is what he thinks of himself. The larger the denominator, the smaller the fraction.

Leo Tolstoy

 

  1. If you want to be happy, try only to please God, not people.

Leo Tolstoy

 

  1. Grow spiritually and help others to do so. It is the meaning of life.

Leo Tolstoy

 

  1. Just as one candle lights another and can light thousands of other candles, so one heart illuminates another heart and can illuminate thousands of other hearts.

Leo Tolstoy

 

  1. When you love someone, you love the person as they are, and not as you’d like them to be.

Leo Tolstoy

  1. People try to do all sorts of clever and difficult things to improve life instead of doing the simplest, easiest thing-refusing to participate in activities that make life bad.

Leo Tolstoy

 

  1. Real wisdom is not the knowledge of everything, but the knowledge of which things in life are necessary, which are less necessary, and which are completely unnecessary to know.

Leo Tolstoy

 

  1. Patriotism in its simplest, clearest, and most indubitable meaning is nothing but an instrument for the attainment of the government’s ambitious and mercenary aims, and a renunciation of human dignity, common sense, and conscience by the governed, and a slavish submission to those who hold power. That is what is really preached wherever patriotism is championed. Patriotism is slavery.

Leo Tolstoy

 

  1. Once we’re thrown off our habitual paths, we think all is lost, but it’s only here that the new and the good begins.

Leo Tolstoy

 

  1. If people tell you that
    you should live your life preparing for the future, do not believe them.
    Real Life is found only in the present.

Leo Tolstoy

 

  1. Art lifts man from his personal life into the universal life.

Leo Tolstoy

 

  1. I believe that order is better than chaos, creation better than destruction. I prefer gentleness to violence, forgiveness to vendetta. On the whole I think knowledge is preferable to ignorance, and I am sure human sympathy is more valuable than ideology.

Leo Tolstoy

 

  1. Very often, all the activity of the human mind is directed not in revealing the truth, but in hiding the truth.

Leo Tolstoy

 

  1. The kinder and more intelligent a person is, the more kindness he can find in other people. Kindness enriches our life; with kindness mysterious things become clear, difficult things become easy and dull things become cheerful.

Leo Tolstoy

 

  1. Everything comes in time to him who knows how to wait.

Leo Tolstoy

 

  1. Love is life. All, everything that I understand, I understand only because I love. Everything is, everything exists, only 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.

Leo Tolstoy

 

  1. Money is a new form of slavery, and distinguishable from the old simply by the fact that it is impersonal – that there is no human relation between master and slave.

Leo Tolstoy

 

  1. Debates conceal rather than reveal the truth. Truth is revealed in solitude.

Leo Tolstoy

 

  1. Truth, like gold, is to be obtained not by its growth, but by washing away from it all that is not gold.

Leo Tolstoy

 

  1. Just imagine that the purpose of life is happiness only-then life becomes a cruel and senseless thing. You have to embrace what the wisdom of humanity, your intellect and your heart tell you: that the meaning of life is to serve the force that sent you into the world. Then life becomes a joy.

Leo Tolstoy

 

  1. Act as if you are, and you will become such.

Leo Tolstoy

 

  1. Happiness consists of living each day as if it were the first day of your honeymoon and the last day of your vacation.

Leo Tolstoy

 

  1. Men pray to the Almighty to relieve poverty.  But poverty comes not from God’s laws-it is blasphemy of the worst kind to say that. Poverty comes from man’s injustice to his fellow man.

Leo Tolstoy

 

  1. It seems that it is impossible to live without discovering the purpose of your life. And the first thing which a person should do is to understand the meaning of life. But the majority of people who consider themselves to be educated are proud that they have reached such great height that they cease to care about the meaning of existence.

Leo Tolstoy

 

Fyodor_Mikhailovich_Dostoyevsky_1876

  1. The best way to keep a prisoner from escaping is to make sure he never knows he’s in prison.

Fyodor Dostoevsky

 

A man who lies to himself, and believes his own lies becomes unable to recognize truth, either in himself or in anyone else, and he ends up losing respect for himself and for others. When he has no respect for anyone, he can no longer love, and, in order to divert himself, having no love in him, he yields to his impulses, indulges in the lowest forms of pleasure, and behaves in the end like an animal. And it all comes from lying – lying to others and to yourself.

Fyodor Dostoevsky

 

  1. Nothing in this world is harder than speaking the truth, nothing easier than flattery.

Fyodor Dostoevsky

 

  1. When I look back on my past and think how much time I wasted on nothing, how much time has been lost in futilities, errors, laziness, incapacity to live; how little I appreciated it, how many times I sinned against my heart and soul-then my heart bleeds. Life is a gift, life is happiness, every minute can be an eternity of happiness.

Fyodor Dostoevsky

 

  1. The darker the night, the brighter the stars, The deeper the grief, the closer is God!

Fyodor Dostoevsky

 

  1. I gave up caring about anything, and all the problems disappeared.

Fyodor Dostoevsky

 

  1. Love the animals, love the plants, love everything. If you love everything, you will perceive the divine mystery in things. Once you perceive it, you will begin to comprehend it better every day. And you will come at last to love the whole world with an all-embracing love.

Fyodor Dostoevsky

 

  1. Life is what matters, life alone – the continuous, eternal process of discovering life – and not the discovery itself.

Fyodor Dostoevsky

 

  1. If you want to overcome the whole world, overcome yourself.

Fyodor Dostoevsky

 

  1. Learning to love is hard and we pay dearly for it. It takes hard work and a long apprenticeship, for it is not just for a moment that we must learn to love, but forever.

Fyodor Dostoevsky

 

 

  1. People speak sometimes about the “bestial” cruelty of man, but that is terribly unjust and offensive to beasts, no animal could ever be so cruel as a man, so artfully, so artistically cruel.

Fyodor Dostoevsky

 

  1. If you wish to glimpse inside a human soul and get to know a man … just watch him laugh. If he laughs well, he’s a good man.

Fyodor Dostoevsky

 

  1. Yes, that’s right… love should come before logic … Only then will man come to understand the meaning of life.

Fyodor Dostoevsky