Leo Tolstoy

All the variety, all the charm, all the beauty of life is made up of light and shadow.

True life is lived when tiny changes occur.

It’s all God’s will: you can die in your sleep, and God can spare you in battle.

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

Music is the shorthand of emotion

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.

The truth is incontrovertible. Malice may attack it and ignorance may deride it, but in the end, there it is.

Men occasionally stumble over the truth, but most of them pick themselves up and hurry off as if nothing ever happened.

It is a puzzling thing. The truth knocks on the door and you say, ‘Go away, I’m looking for the truth.’ and so it goes away. Puzzling.

The bullsh*t is more interesting than the truth.

Truth isn’t truth.

It’s no wonder that truth is stranger than fiction. Fiction has to make sense.

Truth emerges more readily from error than from confusion.

The truth is that there is nothing noble in being superior to somebody else. The only real nobility is in being superior to your former self.

I have such a high regard for the truth that I use it sparingly.

The truth is sometimes a hard pill to swallow. It sometimes causes us difficulties at home and abroad. It is sometimes used by our enemies in attempts to hurt us. But the American people are entitled to it, nonetheless.

It is a pleasure to stand upon the shore, and to see ships tost upon the sea: a pleasure to stand in the window of a castle, and to see a battle and the adventures thereof below: but no pleasure is comparable to standing upon the vantage ground of truth… and to see the errors, and wanderings, and mists, and tempests, in the vale below.

There’s a world of difference between truth and facts. Facts can obscure truth.

If you tell the truth you don’t have to remember anything.

The honest truth is that every day was new, every day was a challenge, every day was starting from a fresh place, and as time went on, over the course of about two years, things became better and better. But I don’t think that there was for me anything like, ‘Ah, this is taking too long’, because ‘long’ didn’t exist. So I see it as a blessing. I have to laugh. I mean there’s no other way to look at it.

All truth is not to be told at all times.