Leo Tolstoy

In the name of God, stop a moment, cease your work, look around you.

You can love a person dear to you with a human love, but an enemy can only be loved with divine love.

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

He felt now that he was not simply close to her, but that he did not know where he ended and she began.

I sit on a man’s back choking him and making him carry me, and yet assure myself and others that i am sorry for him and wish to lighten his load by all means possible….except by getting off his back.

I think… if it is true that there are as many minds as there are heads, then there are as many kinds of love as there are hearts.

Fate is nothing but the deeds committed in a prior state of existence.

It is permissible even for a dying hero to think before he dies how men will speak of him hereafter. His fame lasts perhaps two thousand years. And what are two thousand years?… What, indeed, if you look from a mountain top down the long wastes of the ages? The very stone one kicks with one’s boot will outlast Shakespeare.

We love to expect, and when expectation is either disappointed or gratified, we want to be again expecting.

The only reward of virtue is virtue the only way to have a friend is to be one.

Sir, I do not call a gamester a dishonest man; but I call him an unsociable man, an unprofitable man. Gaming is a mode of transferring property without producing any intermediate good.

A lawyers dream of heaven; every man reclaimed his property at the resurrection, and each tried to recover it from all his forefathers.

Depend upon it that if a man talks of his misfortunes there is something in them that is not disagreeable to him; for where there is nothing but pure misery there never is any recourse to the mention of it.

Slavery is an institution for converting men into monkeys.

The man who is dissatisfied with himself, what can he do?

Virtue is like a rich stone, best plain set.

In the first place, God made idiots. That was for practice. Then he made school boards.

Revenge is a kind of wild justice, which the more a man’s nature runs to, the more ought law to weed it out.

Poor fellow! I think he is in love with you.’ I am not aware of it. And to me it is one of the most odious things in a girl’s life, that there must always be some supposition of falling in love coming between her and any man who is kind to her… I have no ground for the nonsensical vanity of fancying everybody who comes near me is in love with me.

Where women love each other, men learn to smother their mutual dislike.

In general, the art of government consists of taking as much money as possible from one class of citizens to give to another.