Great Throughts Treasury

"A human can 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."

"A king is history's slave."

"A little muzhik was working on the railroad, mumbling in his beard. And the candle by which she had read the book that was filled with fears, with deceptions, with anguish, and with evil, flared up with greater brightness than she had ever known, revealing to her all that before was in darkness, then flickered, grew faint, and went out forever."

"A man having no freedom cannot be conceived of except as deprived of life."

"A thought can advance your life in the right direction only when it answers questions which were asked by your soul. A thought which was first borrowed from someone else and then accepted by your mind and memory does not really much influence your life, and sometimes leads you in the wrong direction. Read less, study less, but think more. Learn, both from your teachers and from the books which you read, only those things which you really need and which you really want to know."

"A man can spend several hours sitting cross-legged in the same position if he knows that noting prevents him from changing it; but if he knows that he has to sit with his legs crossed like that, he will get cramps, his legs will twitch and strain towards where he would like to stretch them."

"A man in motion always devises an aim for that motion. To be able to go a thousand miles he must imagine that something good awaits him at the end of those thousand miles. One must have the prospect of a promised land to have the strength to move."

"A man's every action is inevitably conditioned by what surrounds him and by his own body."

"A modern branch of mathematics, having achieved the art of dealing with the infinitely small, can now yield solutions in other more complex problems of motion, which used to appear insoluble. This modern branch of mathematics, unknown to the ancients, when dealing with problems of motion, admits the conception of the infinitely small, and so conforms to the chief condition of motion (absolute continuity) and thereby corrects the inevitable error which the human mind cannot avoid when dealing with separate elements of motion instead of examining continuous motion. In seeking the laws of historical movement just the same thing happens. The movement of humanity, arising as it does from innumerable human wills, is continuous. To understand the laws of this continuous movement is the aim of history. Only by taking an infinitesimally small unit for observation (the differential of history, that is, the individual tendencies of man) and attaining to the art of integrating them (that is, finding the sum of these infinitesimals) can we hope to arrive at the laws of history."

"A monkey was carrying two handfuls of peas. One little pea dropped out. He tried to pick it up, and split twenty. He tried to pick up the twenty, and split them all. Then he lost his temper, scattered the peas in all directions and ran away"

"A quiet secluded life in the country, with the possibility of being useful to people to whom it is easy to do good, and who are not accustomed to have it done to them; then work which one hopes may be of some use; then rest, nature, books, music, love for one's neighbor ? such is my idea of happiness."

"A man is never such an egotist as at moments of spiritual ecstasy. At such times it seems to him that there is nothing on earth more splendid and interesting than himself."

"A man is like a fraction whose numerator is what he is and whose denominator is what he thinks of himself. The larger the denominator, the smaller the fraction."

"A man on a thousand mile walk has to forget his goal and say to himself every morning, 'Today I'm going to cover twenty-five miles and then rest up and sleep."

"A wound in the soul, coming from the rending of the spiritual body, strange as it may seem, gradually closes like a physical wound. And once a deep wound heals over and the edges seem to have knit, a wound in the soul, like a physical wound, can be healed only by the force of life pushing up from inside. This was the way Natasha's wound healed. She thought her life was over. But suddenly her love for her mother showed her that the essence of life - love - was still alive in her. Love awoke, and life awoke."

"Aesthetic theories arose one hundred fifty years ago among the wealthy classes of the Christian European world. ...And notwithstanding it?s obvious insolidity, nobody else's theory so pleased the cultured crowd or was accepted so readily and with such absence of criticism. It so suited the people of the upper classes that to this day, notwithstanding its entirely fantastic character and the arbitrary nature of its assertions, it is repeated by the educated and uneducated as though it were something indubitable and self-evident."

"A writer is dear and necessary for us only in the measure of which he reveals to us the inner workings of his very soul."

"A wife's a worry, a non-wife's even worse."

"Add your light to the sum of light."

"After all his former doubts, he now felt something he had never before experienced - the certainty that love is invincible."

"After Plotinus, says Schassler, fifteen centuries passed without the slightest scientific interest for the world of beauty and art. ...In reality, nothing of the kind happened. The science of aesthetics ... neither did nor could vanish, because it never existed. ... the Greeks were so little developed that goodness and beauty seemed to coincide. On that obsolete Greek view of life the science of aesthetics was invented by men of the eighteenth century, and especially shaped and mounted in Baumgarten's theory. The Greeks (as anyone may read in B‚nard's book on Aristotle and Walter's work on Plato) never had a science of aesthetics."

"Ah, if everyone was as sensitive as you! There's no girl who hasn't gone through that. And it's all so unimportant!"

"After dinner Natasha, at the request of Prince Andrew went to the clavichord and began to sing. Prince Andrew was standing at the window, talking to the ladies and listened to her. In the middle of a sentence Prince Andrew stopped and felt suddenly that come close to his throat the tears, the possibility that he did not know for themselves. He looked at Natasha singing, and in his heart there was something new and happy. He was happy, and he at the same time it was sad. He emphatically not what was crying, but he was ready to cry? About what? About the same love? About the little princess? About his disappointments? .. On his hopes for the future? Yes and no. The main thing he wanted to cry, was suddenly alive had confessed to them the terrible contrast between something infinitely great and indefinable that were in it, and something narrow and solid than he was, and even she was. This opposition was tormented and pleased him during her singing."

"After the murder of the duc there was one martyr more in heaven and one hero less on earth."

"All families are happy, all families are alike."

"Alexey Alexandorivich had seen nothing striking or improper in the fact that his wife was sitting with Vronsky at a separate table, in eager conversation with him about something. But he noticed that to the rest of the party this appeared to be something striking and improper. He made up his mind that he must speak of it to his wife."

"All great literature is one of two stories; a man goes on a journey or a stranger comes to town."

"All is over?I have nothing but you, remember that. I can never forget what is my whole life."

"All happy families are alike, but an unhappy family is unhappy after its own fashion."

"All happiness is similar, but each has its peculiar physiognomy misfortune."

"All his life Alexey Alexandrovitch had lived and worked in official spheres, having to do with the reflection of life. And every time he had stumbled against life itself he had shrunk away from it. Now he experienced a feeling akin to that of a man who, while calmly crossing a precipice by a bridge, should suddenly discover that the bridge is broken, and that there is a chasm below. That chasm was life itself, the bridge that artificial life in which Alexey Alexandrovitch had lived."

"All man?s efforts, all his impulses to life, are only efforts to increase freedom. Wealth and poverty, fame and obscurity, power and subordination, strength and weakness, health and disease, culture and ignorance, work and leisure, repletion and hunger, virtue and vice, are only greater or lesser degrees of freedom."

"All our problems are caused by forgetting what lives within us, and we sell our souls for the bowl of stew of bodily satisfactions."

"All that day she had had the feeling that she was playing in the theatre with actors better than herself and that her poor playing spoiled the whole thing."

"All the girls in the world were divided into two classes: one class included all the girls in the world except her, and they had all the usual human feelings and were very ordinary girls; while the other class -herself alone- had no weaknesses and was superior to all humanity."

"All the diversity, all the charm, and all the beauty of life are made up of light and shade."

"All we can know is that we know nothing. And that?s the height of human wisdom."

"All violence consists in some people forcing others, under threat of suffering or death, to do what they do not want to do."

"All the variety, all the charm, all the beauty of life is made up of light and shadow."

"All women than men materialists. We do love something enormous and they were always terre-a-terre."

"All were happy -- plants, birds, insects and children. But grown-up people -- adult men and women -- never left off cheating and tormenting themselves and one another. It was not this spring morning which they considered sacred and important, not the beauty of God's world, given to all creatures to enjoy -- a beauty which inclines the heart to peace, to harmony and to love."

"Almrouah may fool most of the people subtle and intelligent, but most kids stupidity discovered and displays them, no matter how brilliantly hidden"

"Although there was no guests, Anna was equally concerned with themselves otherwise and also very keen to read - both novels and serious books, such as was in vogue now. She ordered all the books that were praising featured in foreign newspapers and magazines she received, and plowed through them to the attention of the reading that are only found in humans in solitude."

"Although on a conscious level a man lives for himself, he is actually being used for the attainment of humanity's historical aims. A deed once done becomes irrevocable, and any action comes together over time with millions of actions performed by other people to create historical significance."

"Although Vasili Andreevich felt quite warm in his two fur coats, especially after struggling in the snow drift, a cold shiver ran down his back on realizing that he must really spend the night where they were."

"Always the same. Now a spark of hope flashes up, then a sea of despair rages, and always pain; always pain, always despair, and always the same. When alone he had a dreadful and distressing desire to call someone, but he knew beforehand that with others present it would be still worse."

"Am I mad, to see what others do not see, or are they mad who are responsible for all that I am seeing?"

"Ambition was the old dream of his youth and childhood, a dream which he did not confess even to himself, though it was so strong that now his passion was even doing battle with his love"

"Amid this life based on coercion, one and the same thought constantly emerged among different nations, namely, that in every individual a spiritual element is manifested that gives life to all that exists, and that this spiritual element strives to unite with everything of a like nature to itself, and attains this aim through love."

"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."