Ioana Haluca > Ioana's Quotes

“Three things in human life are important: the first is to be kind; the second is to be kind; and the third is to be kind.”
― Henry James

“There is always some madness in love. But there is also always some reason in madness.”
― Friedrich Nietzsche

“either you are so underdeveloped that you can't see all that you can do, or you won't sacrifice your ease, your vanity, or whatever it is, to do it...”
― Leo Tolstoy

“You ask yourself: where are your dreams now? And you shake your head and say how swiftly the years fly by! And you ask yourself again: what have you done with your best years, then? Where have you buried the best days of your life? Have you lived or not? Look, you tell yourself, look how cold the world is becoming. The years will pass and after them will come grim loneliness, and old age, quaking on its stick, and after them misery and despair. Your fantasy world will grow pale, your dreams will fade and die, falling away like the yellow leaves from the trees… Ah, Nastenka! Will it not be miserable to be left alone, utterly alone, and have nothing even to regret — nothing, not a single thing… because everything I have lost was nothing, stupid, a round zero, all dreaming and no more!”
― Dostoevsky

“It is amazing how complete is the delusion that beauty is goodness.”
― Leo Tolstoy, The Kreutzer Sonata

“Freethinkers are those who are willing to use their minds without prejudice and without fearing to understand things that clash with their own customs, privileges, or beliefs. This state of mind is not common, but it is essential for right thinking...”
― Leo Tolstoy

“Only people who are capable of loving strongly can also suffer great sorrow, but this same necessity of loving serves to counteract their grief and heals them.”
― Leo Tolstoy

“In the name of God, stop a moment, cease your work, look around you.”
― Leo Tolstoy

“Every lie is a poison; there are no harmless lies. Only the truth is safe. Only the truth gives me consolation - it is the one unbreakable diamond.”
― Leo Tolstoy

“If we admit that human life can be ruled by reason, then all possibility of life is destroyed.”
― leo tolstoy, War and Peace

“The best stories don't come from "good vs. bad" but "good vs. good.”
― Leo Tolstoy

“If so many men, so many minds, certainly so many hearts, so many kinds of love.”
― Leo Tolstoy

“I often think that men don't understand what is noble and what is ignorant, though they always talk about it.”
― Leo Tolstoy, Anna Karenina

“Wrong does not cease to be wrong because the majority share in it.”
― Leo Tolstoy, A Confession

“Be bad, but at least don't be a liar, a deceiver!”
― Leo Tolstoy, Anna Karenina

“There is no greatness where there is not simplicity, goodness, and truth.”
― Leo Tolstoy, War and Peace

“Having then for the first time clearly understood that before every man, and before himself, there lay only suffering, death, and eternal oblivion, he had concluded that to live under such conditions was impossible; that one must either explain life to oneself so that it does not seem to be an evil mockery by some sort of devil, or one must shoot oneself.

But he had done neither the one nor the other, yet he continued to live, think, and feel, had even at that very time got married, experienced many joys, and been happy whenever he was not thinking of the meaning of his life.

What did that show? It showed that he had lived well, but thought badly.”
― Leo Tolstoy

“There are no conditions to which a person cannot grow accustomed, especially if he sees that everyone around him lives in the same way.”
― Leo Tolstoy, Anna Karenina

“What I think about vivisection is that if people admit that they have the right to take or endanger the life of living beings for the benefit of many, there will be no limit to their cruelty.”
― Tolstoy Leo

“It's not given to people to judge what's right or wrong. People have eternally been mistaken and will be mistaken, and in nothing more than in what they consider right and wrong.”
― Leo Tolstoy, War and Peace

“It would be good," thought Prince Andrei, glancing at the little image that his sister had hung around his neck with such reverence and emotion, "It would be good if everything were as clear and simple as it seems to Princess Marya . How good it would be to know where to seek help in this life, and what to expect after it, beyond the grave! How happy and at peace I should be if I could now say:" Lord have mercy on me!... But to whom should I say this? To some power--- indefinable and incomprehensible, to which I not only cannot appeal, but which I cannot express in words---The Great All or Nothing," he said to himself, "or to that God who has been sewn into this amulet by Marya? There is nothing certain, nothing except the nothingness of everything that is comprehensible to me, and the greatness of something incomprehensible but all important!”
― Leo Tolstoy

“Ivan Ilych's life had been most simple and most ordinary and therefore most terrible.”
― Leo Tolstoy, The Death of Ivan Ilyich and Other Stories

“There was no solution, save that universal solution which life gives to all questions, even the most complex and insolvable: One must live in the needs of the day--that is, forget oneself.”
― Leo Tolstoy, Anna Karenina

“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

“Am I mad, to see what others do not see, or are they mad who are responsible for all that I am seeing?”
― Leo Tolstoy

“My principal sin is doubt. I doubt everything, and am in doubt most of the time.”
― Leo Tolstoy, Anna Karenina

“Nowadays, as before, the public declaration and confession of Orthodoxy is usually encountered among dull-witted, cruel and immoral people who tend to consider themselves very important. Whereas intelligence, honesty, straightforwardness, good-naturedness and morality are qualities usually found among people who claim to be non-believers.”
― Leo Tolstoy, A Confession

“He was right in saying that the only certain happiness in life is to live for others.”
― Leo Tolstoy

“What counts in making a happy marriage is not so much how compatible you are but how you deal with incompatibility.”
― Leo Tolstoy

“at one time, a freethinker was a man who had been brought up in the conceptions of religion, law and morality, who reached freethought only after conflict and difficulty. But now a new type of born freethinkers has appeared, who grow up without so much as hearing that there used to be laws of morality, or religion, that authorities existed... In the old days, you see, if a man - a Frenchman, for instance- wished to get an education, he would have set to work to study the classics, the theologians, the tragedians, historians and philosophers- and you can realize all the intellectual labour involved. But nowadays he goes straight for the literature of negation, rapidly assimilates the essence of the science of negation, and thinks he's finished.”
― Leo Tolstoy