Tolstoyan Quotes & Sayings

Words, no matter whether they are vocalized and made into sounds or remain unspoken as thoughts, can cast an almost hypnotic spell upon you. You easily lose yourself in them, become hypnotized into implicitly believing that when you have attached a word to something, you know what it is. The fact is: You don't know what it is. You have only covered up the mystery with a label. Everything, a bird, a tree, even a simple stone, and certainly a human being, is ultimately unknowable. This is because it has unfathomable depth. All we can perceive, experience, think about, is the surface layer of reality, less than the tip of an iceberg. — Eckhart Tolle

Attraction is instinct, but action is a choice. — Erica Cameron

Popularity invites criticism, fuels jealousy. It is, for better or worse, human nature. — Chloe Neill

But the thought leaders on talk radio and Fox do more than shape opinion. Backed by their own wing of the book-publishing industry and supported by think tanks that increasingly function as public-relations agencies, conservatives have built a whole alternative knowledge system, with its own facts, its own history, its own laws of economics. — David Frum

Sometimes you're flush and sometimes you're bust, and when you're up, it's never as good as it seems, and when you're down, you never think you'll be up again, but life goes on. — George Jung

You tell anyone that I cried, and I'll cut your liver out."
"Do you even know where a human liver resides?"[ ... ]
"Yes," she said, and punched him in it. — Anne Stuart

I just try to make sure that when I get there on the floor, I play as hard as I can and try to do everything I can to help the team win. — Jeremy Lin

Everyone writes in Tolstoy's shadow, whether one feels oneself to be Tolstoyan or not. — A. N. Wilson

I remain very much connected to my childhood ... I have never been too jaded or too sophisticated. — Hugh Hefner

A story should be like a roller coaster. That is to say before writing a really cruel scene, I have to lift the people's spirits, for example, with a fun scene ... Before writing a scene of pure despair, we must go through scenes of hope. And indeed, when I write, all of this amuses me very much. — Ryukishi07

It is constantly assured, especially in our Tolstoyan tendencies, that when the lion lies down with the lamb the lion becomes lamb-like. But that is brutal annexation and imperialism on the part of the lamb. That is simply the lamb absorbing the lion instead of the lion eating the lamb. The real problem is - Can the lion lie down with the lamb and still retain his royal ferocity? That is the problem the Church attempted; that is the miracle she achieved. — G.K. Chesterton

I'll tell you where my heart is - my heart is just to try to give back. — Joe Craft

What are you, a door mouse?!" Cloudtail mewed impatiently, prodding Lionblaze. Lionblaze looked up at the white warrior looking down at him, "Aww did you have to do that?! I was having a really great dream!"
"And now you can go on a really great water patrol!" Cloudtail grumbled. — Erin Hunter

The wild worship of lawlessness and the materialist worship of law end in the same void. Nietzsche scales staggering mountains, but he turns up ultimately in Tibet. He sits down beside Tolstoy in the land of nothing and Nirvana. They are both helpless - one because he must not grasp anything, and the other because he must not let go of anything. The Tolstoyan's will is frozen by a Buddhist instinct that all special actions are evil. But the Nietzscheite's will is quite equally frozen by his view that all special actions are good; for if all special actions are good, none of them are special. They stand at the crossroads, and one hates all the roads and the other likes all the roads. The result is - well, some things are not hard to calculate. They stand at the cross-roads. — G.K. Chesterton

A free-standing arch of rough-hewn stones and no mortar can be a stable structure, but it is irreducibly complex: it collapses if any one stone is removed. How, then, was it built in the first place? One way is to pile a solid heap of stones, then carefully remove stones one by one. More generally, there are many structures that are irreducible in the sense that they cannot survive the subtraction of any part, but which were built with the aid of scaffolding that was subsequently subtracted and is no longer visible. Once the structure is completed, the scaffolding can be removed safely and the structure remains standing. In evolution, too, the organ or structure you are looking at may have had scaffolding in an ancestor which has since been removed. 'Irreducible — Richard Dawkins

Mother Angelica is proof that we are not limited by other's perceptions, and that God sometimes calls the most unlikely people to great things. — Raymond Arroyo