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"If a man aspires to a righteous life, his first act of abstinence if from injury to animals."
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"The real trouble is that 'kindness' is a quality fatally easy to attribute to ourselves on quite inadequate grounds. Everyone feels benevolent if nothing happens to be annoying him at the moment. Thus a man easily comes to console himself for all his other vices by a conviction that 'his heart's in the right place' and 'he wouldn't hurt a fly,' though in fact he has never made the slightest sacrifice for a fellow creature. We think we are kind when we are only happy: it is not so easy, on the same grounds, to imagine oneself temperate, chaste, or humble."
"At certain moments, the foot slips ; at others, the ground gives way. How many times had that conscience, furious for the right, grasped and overwhelmed him! How many times had truth, inexorable, planted her knee upon his breast! How many times, thrown to the ground by the light, had he cried to it for mercy!"
"Paying attention to the ethical implications of our choices has never been more pressing-or more complicated-than it is today."
"There is a certain right by which we many deprive a man of life, but none by which we may deprive him of death; this is mere cruelty."
"Messages of instant gratification leads to a corrupt society."
"Very few people see their own actions as truly evil,... It is left to their victims to decide what is evil and what is not."
Explore more quotes by Leo Tolstoy
"In the legal respect, after the execution of the supposed incendiaries, the other half of Moscow burned down."
"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."
"I often think that men don't understand what is noble and what is ignorant, though they always talk about it."
"All that day she felt as if she were acting in a theatre with better actors than herself, and that her bad performance was spoiling the whole affair."
"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."
"As a house can be only be built satisfactorily and durably when there is a foundation, and a picture can be painted only when there is something prepared to paint it on, so carnal love is only legitimate, reasonable, and lasting when it is based on the respect and love of one human being for another."
"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."
"Happiness consists in always aspiring perfection, the pause in any level in perfection is the pause of happiness."
"In my considered opinion, salary is payment for goods delivered and it must conform to the law of supply and demand. If, therefore, the fixed salary is a violation of this law - as, for instance, when I see two engineers leaving college together and both equally well trained and efficient, and one getting forty thousand while the other only earns two thousand , or when lawyers and hussars, possessing no special qualifications, are appointed directors of banks with huge salaries - I can only conclude that their salaries are not fixed according to the law of supply and demand but simply by personal influence. And this is an abuse important in itself and having a deleterious effect on government service."
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