Quote #107

History is nothing other than a collection of fables and useless trifles messed up with a mass of unnecessary dates and proper names....Why should any one have to know that the second marriage of Ivan the Terrible to the daughter of Temryuk took place on August 21, 1562, or that the fourth to Ann Alekseyevna Koltovski happened in 1572? Yet they demand that I learn all this by heart, and if I do not know it, they give me a 'one.'

More from Leo Tolstoy

  1. Everyone thinks of changing the world, but no one thinks of changing himself.
  2. History would be a wonderful thing - if it were only true.
  3. And all people live, not by reason of any care they have for themselves, but by the love for them that is in other people.
  4. If he be really and seriously seeking to live a good life, the first thing from which he will abstain will always be the use of animal food…
  5. A writer is dear and necessary for us only in the measure of which he reveals to us the inner workings of his very soul.
  6. If I were told that what I shall write will be read in twenty years by the children of today and that they will weep and smile over it and …
  7. ...the indubitable, eternal truth inherent in man, which is one and the same in all the great religions of the world. It will in due time e…
  8. If one has no vanity in this life of ours, there is no sufficient reason for living.

All Leo Tolstoy quotes