Leo Tolstoy Quotes on Life
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Ivan Ilych's life had been most simple and most ordinary and therefore most terrible.
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Six feet of land was all that he needed.
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The happiness of men consists in life. And life is in labor.
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God is the infinite ALL. Man is only a finite manifestation of Him. Or better yet: God is that infinite All of which man knows himself to be a finite part. God alone exists truly. Man manifests Him in time, space and matter. The more God's manifestation in man (life) unites with the manifestations (lives) of other beings, the more man exists. This union with the lives of other beings is accomplished through love. God is not love, but the more there is of love, the more man manifests God, and the more he truly exists... We acknowledge God only when we are conscious of His manifestation in us. All conclusions and guidelines based on this consciousness should fully satisfy both our desire to know God as such as well as our desire to live a life based on this recognition.
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If you want to be happy, be.
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'What's this? Am I falling? My legs are giving way under me,' he thought, and fell on his back. He opened his eyes, hoping to see how the struggle of the French soldiers with the artilleryman was ending, and eager to know whether the red-haired gunner artilleryman was killed or not, whether the cannons had been taken or saved. But he saw nothing of all that. Above him there was nothing but the sky - the lofty sky, not clear, but still immeasurably lofty, with gray clouds creeping quietly over it.
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Seize the moments of happiness, love and be loved! That is the only reality in the world, all else is folly. It is the one thing we are interested in here.
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You will die - and it will all be over. You will die and find out everything - or cease asking.
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Everything comes in time to him who knows how to wait.
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He did not, and could not, understand the meaning of words apart from their context. Every word and action of his was the manifestation of an activity unknown to him, which was his life.
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Love hinders death. 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.
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To love life is to love God. Harder and more blessed than all else is to love this life in one's sufferings, in undeserved sufferings.
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History is the life of nations and of humanity. To seize and put into words, to describe directly the life of humanity or even of a single nation, appears impossible.
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The sole meaning of life is to serve humanity by contributing to the establishment of the kingdom of God, which can only be done by the recognition and profession of the truth by every man.
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People understand the meaning of eating lies in the nourishment of the body only when they cease to consider that the object of that activity is pleasure. ...People understand the meaning of art only when they cease to consider that the aim of that activity is beauty, i.e., pleasure.
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In order to correctly define art, it is necessary, first of all, to cease to consider it as a means to pleasure and consider it as one of the conditions of human life. ...Reflecting on it in this way, we cannot fail to observe that art is one of the means of affective communication between people.
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If only people freed themselves from their beliefs in... Paradises and Hells, in reincarnations and resurrections, from belief in the interference of the Gods in the external affairs of the universe, and above all, ...from belief ...in the infallibility of ...the historic law, the economic laws, the law of struggle and survival ...futile exercises of our lower capacities of mind and memory called the 'Sciences', and from ...all this harmful, stupefying ballast; -the simple law of love, ...solving all questions and perplexities, would of itself become clear and obligatory.
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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.
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If one has no vanity in this life of ours, there is no sufficient reason for living.
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In the name of God, stop a moment, cease your work, look around you.
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Joy can be real only if people look on their life as a service, and have a definite object in life outside themselves and their personal happiness.
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Only those live who do good.
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The poet takes the best things out of his life and puts them into his work. Hence his work is beautiful and his life bad.
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The only absolute knowledge attainable by man is that life is meaningless.
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True life is lived when tiny changes occur.
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To seek, always to seek... (Tolstoy's final words).