Leo Tolstoy Quotes

Pain is the root of knowledge.

I read 'The Conspiracy Against the Human Race' and found it incredibly powerful writing. For me as a reader, it was less impactful as philosophy than as one writer's ultimate confessional: an absolute horror story, where the self is the monster.

Life is absolutely horrific, leading up to absolute horror.

All our knowledge merely helps us to die a more painful death than animals that know nothing.

Evil being the root of mystery, pain is the root of knowledge.

I've always thought that when they say ignorance is bliss, the converse to that is that knowledge is hell. The more you know, the bleaker things can get.

Loss is something that I think is ultimately the number one struggle for humans.

The toad beneath the harrow knows Exactly where each tooth point goes.

I think my eyes were knocked open and they don't close. I sometimes wish I could close them and look away.

Human cruelty and treachery surpassed all understanding. There were no answers. Only excuses.

Scott Fitzgerald said famously that "he who invented consciousness would have a lot to be blamed for." But he also forgot that without consciousness, he would have no access to true happiness or even the possibility of transcendence.

The more you know, the sadder you get.

The man who has not suffered - what does he know anyway?

Misery is the River of the World

It didn’t rain for you, maybe, but it always rains for me. The sky shatters and rains shards of glass.

Sorrow only increased with knowledge.

Almost the whole of history is but a sequence of horrors.

I could believe only in the hell I was living in, a hell on earth, and it was man-made, not God-made.

In their different ways, art and philosophy help us, in Schopenhauer's words, to turn pain into knowledge.

Life is like a concentration camp... you can't leave without dying.

Pain redeems all. It is the awareness of life, a reminder of death.

You have to be very deep to be dead, he thought, and I'm not. He began to have some concept of forever, and his mind shivered as his body had when he had wakened in the cold nights and thrust his hands between his thighs to keep warm. It will be a long night, he thought.

Aren't all these notes the senseless writings of a man who won't accept the fact that there is nothing we can do with suffering except to suffer it?

I saw a girl complaining that the pain of not being seen was unbearable... Now I have perfect understanding. I have already experienced the worst. After this, there is no worse possible thing.

To perceive is to suffer.