Leo Tolstoy Quotes

You can feel nothing but a torment, and believe nothing but a lie. You will not raise your head to look at all the miracles of life that surround you; but you will run ten miles to see a fight or a death.

I always divide people into two groups. Those who live by what they know to be a lie, and those who live by what they believe, falsely, to be the truth.

Pain forces even the innocent to lie.

Grow your tree of falsehood from a small grain of truth. Do not follow those who lie in contempt of reality. Let your lie be even more logical than the truth itself, so the weary travelers may find repose.

Truth is beautiful, without doubt; but so are lies.

Truth may perhaps come to the price of a pearl, that showeth best by day; but it will not rise to the price of a diamond or carbuncle, that showeth best in varied lights. A mixture of a lie doth ever add pleasure. Doth any man doubt that, if there were taken out of men's minds vain opinions, flattering hopes, false valuations, imaginations as one would, and the like, but it would leave the minds of a number of men poor shrunken things, full of melancholy and indisposition, and unpleasing to themselves?

The pure soul is a pure lie.

If we can revert to the truth, then a great deal of one's suffering can be erased, because a great deal of one's suffering is based on sheer lies.

To have lied is to have suffered.

The world is a lie...not you and me.

Imagination is the deceptive part in man, the mistress of error and falsehood.

Love is only one fine star away, even though the living is sometimes laced with lies.

Everyone seems to be running against a liar, but nobody seems to be one. Odd - I mean, the math doesn't work out.

None of us suffers as much as we should, or loves as much as we say. Love is the first lie; wisdom the last.

If truth is the lure, humans are fishes.

Some disguised deceits counterfeit truth so perfectly that not to be taken in by them would be an error of judgment.

Tell the truth or trump-but get the trick.

Lying is like trying to hide in a fog: If you move about you're in danger of bumping your head against the truth, and as soon as the fog blows off, you are gone anyhow.

Lies are essential to humanity.

Hope is a terrible thing, she said. Is it? Yes, it keep you living in another place, a place which doesn't exist. For some people it's better than where they are. For many it's a relief. From life, she said. A relief from life? Is that living? Some people don't have a choice. No and that's awful for them. Hope is better than misery, he said. Or despair. Hope belongs in the same box as despair. Hope is not so bad, he said. At least despair has truth to it.

A lie always needs a truth for a handle to it. The worst lies are those whose blade is false, but whose handle is true.

An area of life that does not have hope is under a lie.

The distortion of the truth bothers me.