Leo Tolstoy

All happy families are alike, but an unhappy family is unhappy after its own fashion.

Man cannot possess anything as long as he fears death. But to him who does not fear it, everything belongs. If there was no suffering, man would not know his limits, would not know himself.

Doctoring her seemed to her as absurd as putting together the pieces of a broken vase. Her heart was broken. Why would they try to cure her with pills and powders?

It is amazing how complete is the delusion that beauty is goodness.

We can know only that we know nothing. And that is the highest degree of human wisdom.

The Kingdom of God is Within You,

The dice of God are always loaded.

Democracy becomes a government of bullies tempered by editors.

We are made happy when reason can discover no occasion for it. The memory of some past moments is more persuasive than the experience of present ones. There have been visions of such breadth and brightness that these motes were invisible in their light.

A foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds, adored by little statesmen and philosophers and divines.

Every book is a quotation; and every house is a quotation out of all forests, and mines, and stone quarries; and every man is a quotation from all his ancestors.

How lovely the little river is, with its dark changing wavelets! It seems to me like a living companion while I wander along the bank, and listen to its low, placid voice…

Other men are lenses through which we read our own minds. Each man seeks those of different quality from his own, and such as are good of their kind; that is, he seeks other men, and the rest.

The future belongs to those who believe in the beauty of their dreams.

The third component of the Law of Dharma is service to humanity–to serve your fellow human beings and to ask yourself the questions,How can I help? How can I help all those that I come into contact with? When you combine the ability to express your unique talent with service to humanity, then you make full use of the Law of Dharma.

It is seldom that the miserable of the world can help regarding their misery as a wrong inflicted by those who are less miserable.

At the same time that we are earnest to explore and learn all things, we require that all things be mysterious and unexplorable, that land and sea be infinitely wild, unsurveyed and unfathomed by us because unfathomable.

Life grants nothing to us mortals without hard work.

The only place success comes before work is in the dictionary.

The longer we dwell on our misfortunes, the greater is their power to harm us.

After the first blush of sin comes its indifference.