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"There are no conditions to which a man cannot become accustomed."
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"We change when circumstances necessitate it, we adapt because we have to. The real challenge is to change when circumstances don't demand it at all."

"If you want your tree to produce plenty o' fruit, you've got to cut it back from time to time. Same thing with your neural cells. Some people might call it brain damage. I call it prunin'."

"In some peculiar way, indeed, the rules were now beginning to seem quite logical. It was then I knew that I had been in India long enough."

"When fiction has become reality, life may turn into a fairy tale or a firestorm. Tina, time has come to pull up one's socks and start relearning and reassessing living. ['Another empty room']"

"She was not vain enough to work her will against the world. But she could use the things the world had given her."

"To emend one's thinking constantly is a desirable practice, and one I often engage in--sometimes to the point of being almost schizophrenic. But there are cases where one should not parade changes just to prove one is up to date. In the field of ideas, as much as in other fields, monogamy is not necessarily a sign of absence of libido."

"But change proves that you are still alive. Change often measures our tolerance for folk different from ourselves. Can we accept their languages, their customs, their garments, and their foods into our own lives? If we can, then we form bonds, bonds that make wars less likely. If we cannot, if we believe that we must do things as we have always done them, then we must either fight to remain as we are, or die."

"We continuously make promises and create agreements with ourselves and others. Some of these agreements are mutually beneficial. However, when you realize that things you agreed to in the past are no longer helpful, possible, or relevant, renegotiate. Be invested enough in your situations or relationships for renegotiation to take place."

"There is a strong movement, especially in Protestantism, to recast the Christian message in order to make it acceptable to modern man."

"For life to go your way, you must equip yourself with the power of change."
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."

"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."

"Patriotism and its results--wars--give an enormous revenue to the newspaper trade, and profits to many other trades. Every writer, teacher, and professor is more secure in his place the more he preaches patriotism. Every Emperor and King obtains the more fame the more he is addicted to patriotism."

"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 unfree."

"And not only the pride of intellect, but the stupidity of intellect. And, above all, the dishonesty, yes, the dishonesty of intellect. Yes, indeed, the dishonesty and trickery of intellect."
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