Leo Tolstoy Quotes

It's a human phenomenon that there has to be a reason for everything. There almost never is.

The human mind is our fundamental resource.

Things are simple, it is us human beings that make it difficult.

We're all just bags of bones and muscle and hormones; I'll never understand what makes our minds do the things we do. It's like that statue of the monkey holding a skull. We're trying to use a thing we don't understand to understand ourselves.

I can well conceive a man without hands, feet, head. But I cannot conceive man without thought; he would be a stone or a brute.

Our nature is the mind. And the mind is our nature.

The spirit's foe in man has not been simplicity, but sophistication.

We are too much accustomed to attribute to a single cause that which is the product of several, and the majority of our controversies come from that.

There is one radical distinction between different minds … that some minds are stronger and apter to mark the difference of things, others to mark their resemblances.

In analyzing history do not be too profound, for often the causes are quite superficial.

Like a monument, a great cartoon can render a complex idea in a single thrilling and grand summation. Unlike a monument, it is also able to illustrate processes and systems – cause and effect, unintended consequences and the like.

The Bulk of mankind is as well equipped for flying as thinking.

The world you perceive is a drastically simplified model of the real world.

Intellect is invisible to the man who has none.

But shall gravity be therefore called an occult cause, and thrown out of philosophy, because the cause of gravity is occult and not yet discovered? Those who affirm this, should be careful not to fall into an absurdity that may overturn the foundations of all philosophy. For causes usually proceed in a continued chain from those that are more compounded to those that are more simple; when we are arrived at the most simple cause we can go no farther ... These most simple causes will you then call occult and reject them? Then you must reject those that immediately depend on them.

If you will give the matter a moment's thought, you'll see that memory is the highest faculty of the human mind.

I knew that the most important thing a man has is in his head, and from a young age, I often studied the head structure of each person, hoping to crack his codes. I considered a high forehead a gift from God.

We do not know enough about how the present will lead into the future. We shall never be able to say, "Ha! My perception, my accounting for that series, will indeed cover its next and future components," or "Next time I meet with these phenomena, I shall be able to predict their total course."

You can get so well educated in America that your thoughts become detached from common sense. You can get so complicated in your thinking that the obvious isn't real to you anymore.

The human mind can appreciate the One only by seeing it first in the Many.

The mind of man is more intuitive than logical, and comprehends more than it can coordinate.

Words reduce reality to something the human mind can grasp, which isn’t very much.

The simplest and most obvious cause which can there be assigned for any phenomena, is probably the true one.

It is vain philosophy that supposes more causes than are exactly adequate to explain the phenomena of things.

We have no other notion of cause and effect, but that of certain objects, which have always conjoin'd together, and which in all past instances have been found inseparable. We cannot penetrate into the reason of the conjunction. We only observe the thing itself, and always find that from the constant conjunction the objects acquire an union in the imagination.