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"To tell the truth is very difficult, and young people are rarely capable of it."
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"Unfortunately, people who always tell the truth don't have many friends."

"People on the worldly path, to them 'we' say, 'Practice complete honesty. If you cannot do that, then practice honesty within principle of limits. If you cannot do that and if you practice dishonesty, do it within limits. This principle is indeed what will take you further ahead."

"It is completely raw, the sort of thing I feel free to do with the door shut-it's the story undressed, standing up in nothing but its socks and undershorts."

"Even from the point of view of coquetry, pure and simple," he had told her, "can't you see how much of your attraction you throw away when you stoop to lying?"

"While stabbing someones back, you recklessly expose your own."

"Atheists are the most honest of the human race. These people are unable to live a double life; they are unable to lie to themselves. Of course it's an evolutionary handicap, and if that handicap was widespread, our species would run the risk of extinction."
Explore more quotes by Leo Tolstoy

"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 he read about in the newspapers, but the sort he had in his blood, which made him treat all people, whatever their rank or status, in a perfectly equal and identical way; and, third - most important - a perfect indifference to the business he was occupied with, owing to which he never got carried away and never made mistakes."

"Man is created for happiness, that happiness lies in himself, in the satisfaction of simple human needs; and that all unhappiness is due, not to privation but to superfluity."

"One's writing is good only when the intelligence and the imagination are in equilibrium. As soon as one of them overbalances the other, it's all up; you may as well throw it away and begin afresh."

"If only [people] understood that every thought is both false and true! False by one-sidenedness resulting from man's inability to embrace the whole truth, and true as an expression of one fact of human endeavor."

"Those are the men,' added Bolkonsky with a sigh which he could not suppress, as they went out of the palace, 'those are the men who decide the fate of nations."

"Her maternal instinct told her Natasha had too much of something, and because of this she would not be happy."

"Woman, don't you know, is such a subject that however much you study it, it's always perfectly new."
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