One cannot develop taste from what is of average quality but only from the very best. - Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
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. - Leo Tolstoy
An arrogant person considers himself perfect. This is the chief harm of arrogance. It interferes with a person's main task in life - becoming a better person. - Leo Tolstoy
If there existed no external means for dimming their consciences, one-half of the men would at once shoot themselves, because to live contrary to one's reason is a most intolerable state, and all men of our time are in such a state. - Leo Tolstoy
A man can live and be healthy without killing animals for food; therefore, if he eats meat, he participates in taking animal life merely for the sake of his appetite. - Leo Tolstoy
Truth, like gold, is to be obtained not by its growth, but by washing away from it all that is not gold. - Leo Tolstoy
Faith is the sense of life, that sense by virtue of which man does not destroy himself, but continues to live on. It is the force whereby we live. - Leo Tolstoy
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. - Leo Tolstoy
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. - Leo Tolstoy
To say that a work of art is good, but incomprehensible to the majority of men, is the same as saying of some kind of food that it is very good but that most people can't eat it. - Leo Tolstoy
All violence consists in some people forcing others, under threat of suffering or death, to do what they do not want to do. - Leo Tolstoy
We must not only cease our present desire for the growth of the state, but we must desire its decrease, its weakening. - Leo Tolstoy
Joy can only be real if people look upon their life as a service and have a definite object in life outside themselves and their personal happiness. - Leo Tolstoy
Life could be limitless joy, if we would only take it for what it is, in the way it is given to us. - Leo Tolstoy
Pay bad people with your goodness; fight their hatred with you kindness. Even if you do not achieve victory over other people, you will conquer yourself. - Leo Tolstoy
