Joy can only be real if people look upon their life as a service and have a definite object in life outside themselves and their personal happiness.
— Leo Tolstoy
The greater the state, the more wrong and cruel its patriotism, and the greater is the sum of suffering upon which its power is founded.
Without knowing what I am and why I am here, life is impossible.
True life is lived when tiny changes occur.
We lost because we told ourselves we lost.
All, everything that I understand, I understand only because I love.
If so many men, so many minds, certainly so many hearts, so many kinds of love.
Historians are like deaf people who go on answering questions that no one has asked them.
Faith is the sense of life, that sense by virtue of which man does not destroy himself, but continues to live on. It is the force whereby we live.
Truth, like gold, is to be obtained not by its growth, but by washing away from it all that is not gold.
He never chooses an opinion; he just wears whatever happens to be in style.
Music is the shorthand of emotion.
Everyone thinks of changing the world, but no one thinks of changing himself.
Nietzsche was stupid and abnormal.
The chief difference between words and deeds is that words are always intended for men for their approbation, but deeds can be done only for God.
In all history there is no war which was not hatched by the governments, the governments alone, independent of the interests of the people, to whom war is always pernicious even when successful.
I sit on a man's back, choking him and making him carry me, and yet assure myself and others that I am very sorry for him and wish to ease his lot by all possible means - except by getting off his back.
The changes in our life must come from the impossibility to live otherwise than according to the demands of our conscience not from our mental resolution to try a new form of life.
To say that a work of art is good, but incomprehensible to the majority of men, is the same as saying of some kind of food that it is very good but that most people can't eat it.
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.
All happy families resemble one another, each unhappy family is unhappy in its own way.
War is so unjust and ugly that all who wage it must try to stifle the voice of conscience within themselves.
In the name of God, stop a moment, cease your work, look around you.
War on the other hand is such a terrible thing, that no man, especially a Christian man, has the right to assume the responsibility of starting it.
Art is not a handicraft, it is the transmission of feeling the artist has experienced.
The law condemns and punishes only actions within certain definite and narrow limits; it thereby justifies, in a way, all similar actions that lie outside those limits.
If you want to be happy, be.
Even in the valley of the shadow of death, two and two do not make six.
We must not only cease our present desire for the growth of the state, but we must desire its decrease, its weakening.
All violence consists in some people forcing others, under threat of suffering or death, to do what they do not want to do.
Man lives consciously for himself, but is an unconscious instrument in the attainment of the historic, universal, aims of humanity.
Boredom: the desire for desires.
There is no greatness where there is no simplicity, goodness and truth.
One of the first conditions of happiness is that the link between Man and Nature shall not be broken.
Our body is a machine for living. It is organized for that, it is its nature. Let life go on in it unhindered and let it defend itself.
The sole meaning of life is to serve humanity.
Government is an association of men who do violence to the rest of us.
The two most powerful warriors are patience and time.
A man can live and be healthy without killing animals for food; therefore, if he eats meat, he participates in taking animal life merely for the sake of his appetite.
If there existed no external means for dimming their consciences, one-half of the men would at once shoot themselves, because to live contrary to one's reason is a most intolerable state, and all men of our time are in such a state.
It is amazing how complete is the delusion that beauty is goodness.
An arrogant person considers himself perfect. This is the chief harm of arrogance. It interferes with a person's main task in life - becoming a better person.
