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“No matter how old or how sick you are, how much or little you have done, your business in life not only isn’t finished, but hasn’t yet received its final, decisive meaning until your very last breath.”
“Man is flowing. In him there are all possibilities: he was stupid, now he is clever; he was evil, now he is good, and the other way around. In this is the greatness of man.”
[To understand all is to forgive all].
‘We don’t love people so much for the good they have done us, as for the good we have done them.’ Father
if it were possible to know what is beyond death, none of us would be afraid of it.
“Youth is no hindrance to courage,”
Looking into Napoleon’s eyes Prince Andrew thought of the insignificance of greatness, the unimportance of life which no one could understand, and the still greater unimportance of death, the meaning of which no one alive could understand or explain.
There is nothing certain, nothing at all except the unimportance of everything I understand, and the greatness of something incomprehensible but all-important.”
“You’ll die and all will end. You’ll die and know all, or cease asking.”
To know Him is hard. . . . For ages, from our forefather Adam to our own day, we labor to attain that knowledge and are still infinitely far from our aim; but in our lack of understanding we see only our weakness and His greatness. . . .”
“He is not to be apprehended by reason, but by life,”
“I only know two very real evils in life: remorse and illness.
“Life as it is leaves one no peace.
Gospel truth which has become for me a principle of life: not a single hair of our heads will fall without His will. And His will is governed only by infinite love for us, and so whatever befalls us is for our good.
we cannot be both idle and at ease.
Rulers and generals are “history’s slaves”
“The king’s heart is in the hands of the Lord.”
A king is history’s slave.
historic events the so-called great men are labels giving names to events, and like labels they have but the smallest connection with the event itself.
“Don’t imagine that sorrow is the work of men. Men are His tools.”
Remember that misfortunes come from God, and men are never to blame,”
war is the favorite pastime of the idle and frivolous.
it has of late become hard for me to live. I see that I have begun to understand too much. And it doesn’t do for man to taste of the tree of knowledge of good and evil. . . .
every time there have been conquests there have been conquerors; every time there has been a revolution in any state there have been great men,”
To study the laws of history we must completely change the subject of our observation, must leave aside kings, ministers, and generals, and study the common, infinitesimally small elements by which the masses are moved.
The spoken word is silver but the unspoken is golden.
“The ways of God are past finding out!”
the more deeply he penetrated into the new principle of eternal love revealed to him, the more he unconsciously detached himself from earthly life.
all desire for positive happiness is implanted in us merely to torment us and never be satisfied.
pure and complete sorrow is as impossible as pure and complete joy.
“Because there is a God, that God without whose will not one hair falls from a man’s head.”
“Chance created the situation; genius utilized it,” says history.
As soon as historians of different nationalities and tendencies begin to describe the same event, the replies they give immediately lose all meaning, for this force is understood by them all not only differently but often in quite contradictory ways.
