No one can attain to truth by himself. Only by laying stone on stone with the cooperation of all, by the millions of generations from our forefather Adam to our own times, is that temple...

If goodness has causes, it is not goodness; if it has effects, a reward, it is not goodness either. So goodness is outside the chain of cause and effect.

A finalidade ds humanos não consiste e cumprir o que eles consideram bem mas em chamar ‘meu’ ao maior número possível de objectos.

All the horrors of the reign of terror were based on concern for public tranquility.

Pure and complete sorrow is as impossible as pure and complete joy.

The most mentally deranged people are those who see in others indications of insanity they do not notice in themselves.

And what is justice? The princess thought of that proud word ‘justice’. All the complex laws of man centered for her in one clear and simple law—the law of love and self-sacrifice taught us by...

everything comes in time to him who knows how to wait . . . there is nothing stronger than these two: patience and time, they will do it all.

The main qualities that had earned him this universal respect in the service were, first, an extreme indulgence towards people, based on his awareness of his own shortcomings; second, a perfect liberalism, not the sort...

As often happens between people who have chosen different ways, each of them, while rationally justifying the other’s activity, despised it in his heart. To each of them it seemed that the life he led...

Pierre was right when he said that one must believe in the possibility of happiness in order to be happy, and I now believe in it. Let the dead bury the dead, but while I’m...

Then he thought himself unhappy, but happiness was all in the future; now he felt that the best happiness was already in the past.

There lay between them, separating them, that same terrible line of the unknown and of fear, like the line separating the living from the dead.

Her eyes, always sad, now looked into the mirror with particular hopelessness. “She’s flattering me,” thought the princess, and she turned away and went on reading. Julie, however, was not flattering her friend: indeed, the...

We are all brothers, and yet I live by receiving a salary for arraigning, judging and punishing a thief or a prostitute, whose existence is conditioned by the whole consumption of my life.

[…] but just as formerly these pursuits and ideas had seemed petty and insignificant in comparison with the darkness that overshadowed all existence, so now they seemed as petty and insignificant in comparison with the...

Was it by reason that I attained to the knowledge that I must love my neighbor and not to throttle him?. They told me so when I was a child, and I gladly believed it,...

He saw either death or the approach of it everywhere. But his undertaking now occupied him all the more. He had to live his life to the end, until death came. Darkness covered everything for...

I … having filled my life with the spiritual blessings Christianity gave me, brimful of these blessings and living by them, I, like a child, not understanding them, destroy them — that is, I wish...

I understood, not with my intellect but with my whole being, that no theories of the rationality of existence or of progress could justify such an act; I realized that even if all the people...

The Lord had given them the day and the Lord had given them the strength. And the day and the strength had been dedicated to labor, and the labor was its reward. Who was the...

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.

Wrong does not cease to be wrong because the majority share in it.

In actuality, it was like the homes of all people who are not really rich but who want to look rich, and therefore end up looking like one another: it had damasks, ebony, plants, carpets,...

It was necessary that millions of men in whose hands lay the real power — the soldiers who fired, or transported provisions and guns — should consent to carry out the will of these weak...

Natasha, with a vigorous turn from her heel on to her toe, walked over to the middle of the room and stood still… Natasha took the first note, her throat swelled, her bosom heaved, a...

He was nine years old; he was a child; he he knew his own soul, it was precious to him, he guarded it as the eyelid guards the eye, and without the key of love...

Din orice situatie exista o iesire

Is it really possible to tell someone else what one feels?

At moments of departure and a change of life, people capable of reflecting on their actions usually get into a serious state of mind. At these moments they usually take stock of the past and...

In the best, the friendliest and simplest relations flattery or praise is necessary, just as grease is necessary to keep wheels turning.

if they hadn’t both been pretending, but had had what is called a heart-to-heart talk, that is, simply told each other just what they were thinking and feeling, then they would just have looked into...

We are asleep until we fall in Love!

Este incredibil c t de completă este iluzia care ne face să credem că frumuseţea este în genere bunătate.

Well, pray if you like, only you’d do better to use your judgment.

Se toda a vida complexa de muitas pessoas se desenrola inconscientemente, então é como se essa vida não tivesse existido.

Blessed are the peacemakers; theirs is the kingdom of heaven

Pierre had for the first time experienced that strange and fascinating feeling in the Slobodsky palace, when he suddenly felt that wealth and power and life, all that men build up and guard with such...

Society in itself is no great harm, but unsatisfied social aspirations are a bad and ugly business. We must certainly accept, and we will.

He stepped down, trying not to look long at her, as if she were the sun, yet he saw her, like the sun, even without looking.

Patience is waiting. Not passively waiting. That is laziness. But to keep going when the going is hard and slow – that is patience. The two most powerful warriors are patience and time.

Whether he was acting ill or well he did not know, and far from laying down the law about it, he now avoided talking or thinking about it. Thinking about it led him into doubts...

He did what heroes do after their work is accomplished; he died.

If we admit that human life can be ruled by reason, then all possibility of life is destroyed.

He had learned that, as there is no situation in the world in which a man can be happy and perfectly free, so there is no situation in which he can be perfectly unhappy and...

Let fear once get possession of the soul, and it does not readily yield its place to another sentiment.Sebastopol by Leo Tolstoy

You say: I am not free. But I have raised and lowered my arm. Everyone understands that this illogical answer is an irrefutable proof of freedom.

She was utterly unlike what she had been when he first saw her. Both morally and physically she had changed for the worse. […] He looked at her as a man looks at a faded...

When the peasants and their song had vanished from his sight and hearing, a heavy feeling of anguish at his loneliness, his bodily idleness, his hostility to this world, came over him…It was all drowned...

She had no need to ask why he had come. She knew as certainly as if he had told her that he was here to be where she was.