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"Historians are like deaf people who go on answering questions that no one has asked them."
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"It is not true that people are naturally equal for no two people can be together for even a half an hour without one acquiring an evident superiority over the other."

"There are only two kinds of people who are really fascinating - people who know absolutely everything, and people who know absolutely nothing."

"Most people die of a sort of creeping common sense, and discover when it is too late that the only things one never regrets are one's mistakes."

"The real problem is not why some pious, humble, believing people suffer, but why some do not."

"He makes people pleased with him by making them first pleased with themselves."

"People are always good company when they are doing what they really enjoy."
Explore more quotes by Leo Tolstoy

"Man lives consciously for himself, but is an unconscious instrument in the attainment of the historic, universal, aims of humanity."

"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 him; but precisely because of this darkness he felt that his undertaking was the only guiding thread in this darkness, and he seized it and held on to it with all his remaining strength."

"What is reason given me for, if I am not to use it to avoid bringing unhappy beings into the world!"

"Our life has been joined, not by man, but by God. That union can only be severed by a crime, and a crime of that nature brings its own chastisement."

"The changes in our life must come from the impossibility to live otherwise than according to the demands of our conscience not from our mental resolution to try a new form of life."

"The very same thing, don't you see, may be looked at tragically, and turned into a misery, or it may be looked at simply and even humorously. Possibly you are inclined to look at things too tragically."

"Our body is a machine for living. It is organized for that, it is its nature. Let life go on in it unhindered and let it defend itself."

"While I doubted, I had hope; but now there is no hope left and all the same I doubt everything."

"But to us of a later generation...it is inconceivable that millions of Christian men should have killed and tortured each other, because Napoleon was ambitious, Alexander firm, English policy crafty, and the Duke of Oldenburg hardly treated. We cannot grasp the connections between these circumstances and the bare fact of murder and violence, nor why the duke's wrongs should induce thousands of men from the other side of Europe to pillage and murder the inhabitants of the Smolensk and Moscow provinces and to be slaughtered by them."
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