Loving the same man or woman all your life, why, that's like supposing the same candle could last you all your life

What counts in making a happy marriage is not so much how compatible you are but how you deal with incompatibility.

One of the most obtuse superstitions is the superstition of the scientists who say that man can exist without faith.

Once we're thrown off our habitual paths, we think all is lost, but it's only here that the new and the good begins.

Life consists in penetrating the unknown, and fashioning our actions in accord with the new knowledge thus acquired.

In Varenka, she realized that one has but to forget oneself and love others, and one will be calm, happy, and noble.

The truth is obtained like gold, not by letting it grow bigger, but by washing off from it everything that isn't gold

When you say, 'I can’t do that,' you're expressing yourself incorrectly. You should say, 'I couldn’t do that before.'

My piece of bread only belongs to me when I know that everyone else has a share, and that no one starves while I eat.

I must write each day without fail, not so much for the success of the work, as in order not to get out of my routine.

We must not only cease our present desire for the growth of the state, but we must desire its decrease, its weakening.

It's like scarlet fever: one has to get it over." "Then one should invent a way of inoculating love, like vaccination.

Music makes me forget myself, my true condition, it carries me off into another state of being, one that isn't my own.

The chief attraction of military service has consisted and will consist in this compulsory and irreproachable idleness.

As long as there are slaughterhouses there will be battlefields. A vegetarian diet is the acid test of humanitarianism.

Talent is the capacity to direct concentrated attention upon the subject: "the gift of seeing what others have not seen.

A writer is dear and necessary for us only in the measure of which he reveals to us the inner workings of his very soul.

From the child of five to myself is but a step. But from the newborn baby to the child of five is an appalling distance.

In life, in true life, there can be nothing better than what is. Wanting something different than what is, is blasphemy.

Some mathematician, I believe, has said that true pleasure lies not in the discovery of truth, but in the search for it.

The antagonism between life and conscience may be removed in two ways: by a change of life or by a change of conscience.

He felt that he was himself and did not wish to be anyone else. He only wished now to be better than he had been formerly

There will be today, there will be tomorrow, there will be always, and there was yesterday, and there was the day before.

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.

The teaching of the church, theoretically astute, is a lie in practice and a compound of vulgar superstitions and sorcery.

The struggle with evil by means of violence is the same as an attempt to stop a cloud, in order that there may be no rain.

This history of culture will explain to us the motives, the conditions of life, and the thought of the writer or reformer.

Power is the sum total of the wills of the mass, transfered by express or tactic agreement to rulers chosen by the masses.

The appreciation of the merits of art (of the emotions it conveys) depends upon an understanding of the meaning of life...

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.

Man recognizes that he will not die, only when he recognizes that he was never born, but always has been, is, and will be.

Here I am...wanting to accomplish something and completely forgetting it must all end--that there is such a thing as death.

All violence consists in some people forcing others, under threat of suffering or death, to do what they do not want to do.

It's too easy to criticize a man when he's out of favour, and to make him shoulder the blame for everybody else's mistakes.

I don't want to prove anything; I merely want to live, to do no one harm but myself. I have the right to do that, haven't I?

... in marriage the great thing was love, and that with love one would always be happy, for happiness rests only on oneself.

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.

The more is given the less the people will work for themselves, and the less they work the more their poverty will increase.

And those who only know the non-platonic love have no need to talk of tragedy. In such love there can be no sort of tragedy.

Man by violating his own feelings becomes cruel. And how deeply seated in the human heart is the injunction not to take life.

I felt a wish never to leave that room - a wish that dawn might never come, that my present frame of mind might never change.

Are we not all flung into the world for no other purpose than to hate each other, and so to torture ourselves and one another?

So he lived, not knowing and not seeing any chance of knowing what he was and for what purpose he had been placed in the word.

Before we can study the central issues of life today, we must destroy the prejudices and fallacies born of previous centuries.

Not all of life's roads are set fast, for a man may do this or a man may do that and not even the gods know the mind of a man.

The simplest and shortest ethical precept is to be served as little as possible . . . and to serve others as much as possible.

I was now prepared to accept any faith so long as it did not demand a direct denial of reason, which would have been a deceit.

I now understand that my welfare is only possible if I acknowledge my unity with all the people of the world without exception.

The higher a man's conception of God, the better will he know Him. And the better he knows God, the nearer will he draw to Him.

To say that you can love one person all your life is just like saying that one candle will continue burning as long as you live.

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