Leo Tolstoy

"What Tolstoy believed with special conviction was that, in essence, all religions held soul-force to be superior to brute force and taught that evil should be requited with good, not evil." M. K. Gandhi

namely, what we call the renunciation of all opposition by force, which is simply the law of love unperverted by sophistries.

The longer I live – especially now when I clearly feel the approach of death – the more I feel moved to express what I feel more strongly than anything else, and what in my opinion is of immense importance,

The better people live, the less they complain about others. The worse people live, the more they’re displeased with others rather than with themselves.

Asking God to send you blessings in this life is like sitting at a spring and asking the spring to quench your thirst. You’ve been given every possible blessing. You only need to be able to use them.

If there’s life after death then it’s something we can’t imagine.

One of the most astonishing delusions is the belief that human happiness lies in inactivity. People are so convinced of this that they even imagine paradise as a place where people do nothing.

Soon the time will come when people not only understand but feel all the barbarity and cruelty of murdering living beings to satisfy their gluttony.

If a person is living a spiritual life then wealth is not just unnecessary but a nuisance.

A person is never closer to God than when he’s in trouble. Make use of such situations so that you don’t lose the opportunity to draw close to the only one who can give you eternal happiness.

It’s good to agree with a friend that you’ll part as soon as one of you starts criticizing someone close to you. If you don’t have such a friend, make that agreement with yourself.

Relate the truth with kindness and the stupidest person in the world will understand you.

The importance of self-restraint in speech can be seen by the fact that if you relate the truth with anger or passion you won’t convince anyone no matter how obvious to you the truth you’re relating is.

The more a person lives for others, the freer and more joyful is his life. The more he lives for himself alone, the more his life is constricted and painful.

"Compassion for animals is so closely tied to goodness that I dare say that a person who’s cruel to animals cannot be a good person." Schopenhauer