Salt > Salt's Quotes

“Pierre was right when he said that one must believe in the possibility of happiness in order to be happy, and I now believe in it. Let the dead bury the dead, but while I'm alive, I must live and be happy.”
― Leo Tolstoy, War and Peace

“God is an idea, of collective humanity, of the masses, of everybody”
― Fyodor Dostoevsky

“We are asleep until we fall in Love!”
― Leo Tolstoy, War and Peace

“Nature does not ask your permission, she has nothing to do with your wishes, and whether you like her laws or dislike them, you are bound to accept her as she is, and consequently all her conclusions.”
― Fyodor Dostoyevsky, Notes from Underground, White Nights, The Dream of a Ridiculous Man, and Selections from The House of the Dead

“Through others we become ourselves.”
― Lev S. Vygotsky

“Life is everything. Life is God. Everything shifts and moves, and this movement is God. And while there is life, there is delight in the self-awareness of the divinity. To love life is to love God. The hardest and most blissful thing is to love this life in one's suffering, in the guiltlessness of suffering.”
― Leo Tolstoy, War and Peace

“I have approached a degree of love that is so unwise,
In one world that it is wisdom in another,
I am strange,
I no longer have respect for hate,
I'm stronger than hate.

I'm contemptuous of both those who hate and those who destroy,
I'm not a part of the world which hates and the world which destroys,
I want a better world and not only do I want a better world,
I seek to live a better life,
that I might have a right to be a part of a better world,
if I hate and destroy I have no right to speak of love,
love is greater than hate,
and I have chosen love above all else in the world.”
― Sun Ra

“Have you ever stopped to think, Clare,” Irene demanded, “how much unhappiness and downright cruelty are laid to the loving-kindness of the Lord? And always by His most ardent followers, it seems.”
― Nella Larsen, Passing

“Human science fragments everything in order to understand it, kills everything in order to examine it. ”
― Leo Tolstoy, War and Peace

“I need a father. I need a mother. I need some older, wiser being to cry to. I talk to God, but the sky is empty.”
― Sylvia Plath, The Unabridged Journals of Sylvia Plath

“I will not and cannot believe that evil is the normal condition of mankind.”
― Fyodor Dostoevsky, The Dream of a Ridiculous Man

“Christ will not be angered by love”
― Fyodor Dostoevsky

“When a historian looks back, what he sees is Death. It is everywhere, the universal constant informing every act. Only the Historian is aware of how we are blind to the amount of history pushing into our backs- blind to time and our place in it. We are ignorant of history and ignorant of Death, and only the Historian sees it for what it is.”
― Have a Nice Life, Deathconsciousness

“Everything I know, I know because of love.”
― Leo Tolstoy, War and Peace

“We can know only that we know nothing. And that is the highest degree of human wisdom.”
― Leo Tolstoy, War and Peace

“Oh, maybe it started innocently,
with a joke, with coquetry, with amorous play, maybe, indeed, with an atom, but
this atom of lie penetrated their hearts, and they liked it. Then sensuality was
quickly born, sensuality generated jealousy, and jealousy - cruelty. . . Oh, I don’t
know, I don’t remember, but soon, very soon, the first blood was shed; they were
astonished and horrified, and began to part, to separate. Alliances appeared, but
against each other now. Rebukes, reproaches began. They knew shame, and shame
was made into a virtue. The notion of honor was born, and each alliance raised its
own banner. They began tormenting animals, and the animals withdrew from them
into the forests and became their enemies. There began the struggle for separation,
for isolation, for the personal, for mine and yours. They started speaking different
languages. They knew sorrow and came to love sorrow, they thirsted for suffering
and said that truth is attained only through suffering. Then science appeared
among them.”
― Fyodor Dostoyevsky, The Dream of a Ridiculous Man

“Security. Was it just a word? If not, then was it only by the sacrifice of other things, happiness, love, or some wild ecstasy that she had never known, that it could be obtained? And did too much driving, too much faith in safety and permanence, unfit one for these other things?
Irene didn't know, couldn't decide, though for a long time she sat questioning and trying to understand. Yet all the while, in spite of her searchings and feelings of frustration, she was aware that, to her, security was the most important and desired thing in life. Not for any of the others, or for all of them, would she exchange it. She wanted only to be tranquil. Only, unmolested, to be allowed to direct for their own best good the lives of her sons and her husband.”
― Nella Larsen, Passing

“This is the final thing I have done in psychology - and I will like Moses die at the summit, having glimpsed the promised land but without setting foot on it. Farewell, dear creations. The rest is silence.”
― Lev Vysotsky

“why was I raised to follow the precepts of a religion that exalts sorrow and suffering? Yet my nose is as innocent as any snout. If I had been an animal I would have been very successful. But a man?”
― René Crevel, My Body and I

“It is because this sensation of truth provides me with a joy I would be unable to describe in human words that I believe it to be from some other world and that, through its
miracle, I can already picture myself having passed through the gates of death.”
― René Crevel, My Body and I

“Man cannot possess anything as long as he fears death. But to him who does not fear it, everything belongs. If there was no suffering, man would not know his limits, would not know himself. ”
― Leo Tolstoy, War and Peace

“They say: sufferings are misfortunes," said Pierre. 'But if at once this minute, I was asked, would I remain what I was before I was taken prisoner, or go through it all again, I should say, for God's sake let me rather be a prisoner and eat horseflesh again. We imagine that as soon as we are torn out of our habitual path all is over, but it is only the beginning of something new and good. As long as there is life, there is happiness. There is a great deal, a great deal before us.”
― Leo Tolstoy, War and Peace

“I feel like the oldest person in the world with the longest stretch of life before me.”
― Nella Larsen, Passing

“The announcement to mother: "Don't be sad, mother. God betrayed me. I am His widow. I've become ageless and all my memories are smothered.”
― Max Ernst, A Little Girl Dreams of Taking the Veil

“Help me, Lord! Father, if it be Thy will to forsake me, then Thy will be done, but if I am the cause of these things, teach me what I am to do. I shall perish in my vileness if Thou shouldst utterly forsake me.”
― Lev Tolstoj, War and Peace

“I think,” she said at last, “that being a mother is the cruellest thing in the world.”
― Nella Larsen, Passing

“Money's awfully nice to have. In
fact, all things considered, I think, 'Rene, that
it's even worth the price.”
― Nella Larsen, Passing

“I'm human like everybody else. It's just that I'm so tired, so worn out, I can't feel anymore.”
― Nella Larsen, Passing

“Yes, life went on precisely as before. It was only she that had changed. Knowing, stumbling on this thing, had changed her. It was as if in a house long dim, a match had been struck, showing ghastly shapes where had been only blurred shadows.”
― Nella Larsen, Passing

“Irene Redfield wished, for the first time in her life, that she had not been born a Negro. For the first time she suffered and rebelled because she was unable to disregard the burden of race. It was, she cried silently, enough to suffer as a woman, an individual, on one’s own account, without having to suffer for the race as well. It was a brutality, and undeserved.”
― Nella Larsen, Passing