Umar Khan > Umar's Quotes

“If only we could see the endless string of consequences that result from our smallest actions. But we can’t know better until knowing better is useless.”
― John Green, Looking for Alaska

“The Buddha knew one thing science didn’t prove for millennia after his death: Entropy increases. Things fall apart.”
― John Green, Looking for Alaska

“But there’s a Sufi story that challenges the notion that people believe only because they need an opiate. Rabe’a al-Adiwiyah, a great woman saint of Sufism, was seen running through the streets of her hometown, Basra, carrying a torch in one hand and a bucket of water in the other. When someone asked her what she was doing, she answered, ‘I am going to take this bucket of water and pour it on the flames of hell, and then I am going to use this torch to burn down the gates of paradise so that people will not love God for want of heaven or fear of hell, but because He is God.”
― John Green, Looking for Alaska

“If no one fought except on his own conviction, there would be no wars,”
― Leo Tolstoy, Leo Tolstoy: The Complete Novels and Novellas

“Never, never marry, my dear fellow! That’s my advice: never marry till you can say to yourself that you have done all you are capable of, and until you have ceased to love the woman of your choice and have seen her plainly as she is, or else you will make a cruel and irrevocable mistake. Marry when you are old and good for nothing—or all that is good and noble in you will be lost. It will all be wasted on trifles.”
― Leo Tolstoy, Leo Tolstoy: The Complete Novels and Novellas

“People are always too clever with their eldest children and try to make something exceptional of them,”
― Leo Tolstoy, Leo Tolstoy: The Complete Novels and Novellas

“At nighttime in the moon’s fair glow How sweet, as fancies wander free, To feel that in this world there’s one Who still is thinking but of thee!”
― Leo Tolstoy, Leo Tolstoy: The Complete Novels and Novellas

“He used to say that there are only two sources of human vice—idleness and superstition, and only two virtues—activity and intelligence.”
― Leo Tolstoy, War and Peace

“Ah, if we had not religion to console us life would be very sad.”
― Leo Tolstoy, Leo Tolstoy: The Complete Novels and Novellas

“I never could understand the fondness some people have for confusing their minds by dwelling on mystical books that merely awaken their doubts and excite their imagination, giving them a bent for exaggeration quite contrary to Christian simplicity.”
― Leo Tolstoy, Leo Tolstoy: The Complete Novels and Novellas

“One step beyond that boundary line which resembles the line dividing the living from the dead lies uncertainty, suffering, and death. And what is there? Who is there?—there beyond that field, that tree, that roof lit up by the sun? No one knows, but one wants to know. You fear and yet long to cross that line, and know that sooner or later it must be crossed and you will have to find out what is there, just as you will inevitably have to learn what lies the other side of death. But you are strong, healthy, cheerful, and excited, and are surrounded by other such excitedly animated and healthy men.”
― Leo Tolstoy, War and Peace

“And not only externally was all in order, but had it pleased the commander-in-chief to look under the uniforms he would have found on every man a clean shirt, and in every knapsack the appointed number of articles, “awl, soap, and all,” as the soldiers say.”
― Leo Tolstoy, War and Peace

“how differently do those clouds glide across that lofty infinite sky! How was it I did not see that lofty sky before? And how happy I am to have found it at last! Yes! All is vanity, all falsehood, except that infinite sky. There is nothing, nothing, but that. But even it does not exist, there is nothing but quiet and peace. Thank God! . . .”
― Leo Tolstoy, War and Peace

“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.”
― Leo Tolstoy, War and Peace

“Seize the moments of happiness, love and be loved! That is the only reality in the world, all else is folly. It is the one thing we are interested in here.”
― Leo Tolstoy, War and Peace

“What is bad? What is good? What should one love and what hate? What does one live for? And what am I? What is life, and what is death? What power governs all?”1”
― Leo Tolstoy, War and Peace

“What is bad? What is good? What should one love and what hate? What does one live for? And what am I? What is life, and what is death? What power governs all?”1 There was no answer to any of these questions, except one, and that not a logical answer and not at all a reply to them. The answer was: “You’ll die and all will end. You’ll die and know all, or cease asking.” But dying was also dreadful.”
― Leo Tolstoy, War and Peace

“All we can know is that we know nothing. And that’s the height of human wisdom.”
― Leo Tolstoy, War and Peace

“Who invented Him, if He did not exist? Whence came thy conception of the existence of such an incomprehensible Being? didst thou, and why did the whole world, conceive the idea of the existence of such an incomprehensible Being, a Being all-powerful, eternal, and infinite in all His attributes? . . .”
― Leo Tolstoy, War and Peace

“Whether he accepted the wise reasoning contained in the Mason’s words, or believed as a child believes, in the speaker’s tone of conviction and earnestness, or the tremor of the speaker’s voice—which sometimes almost broke—or those brilliant aged eyes grown old in this conviction, or the calm firmness and certainty of his vocation, which radiated from his whole being (and which struck Pierre especially by contrast with his own dejection and hopelessness)—”
― Leo Tolstoy, War and Peace

“No one can attain to truth by himself. Only by laying stone on stone with the cooperation of all, by the millions of generations from our forefather Adam to our own times, is that temple reared which is to be a worthy dwelling place of the Great God,”
― Leo Tolstoy, War and Peace

“The love of death. “In the seventh place, try, by the frequent thought of death,” the Rhetor said, “to bring yourself to regard it not as a dreaded foe, but as a friend that frees the soul grown weary in the labors of virtue from this distressful life, and leads it to its place of recompense and peace.”
― Leo Tolstoy, War and Peace

“ensign might rank incomparably higher than a general, and according to which what was needed for success in the service was not effort or work, or courage, or perseverance, but only the knowledge of how to get on with those who can grant rewards,”
― Leo Tolstoy, War and Peace

“I only know two very real evils in life: remorse and illness. The only good is the absence of those evils. To live for myself avoiding those two evils is my whole philosophy now.”
― Leo Tolstoy, War and Peace

“I lived for glory.—And after all what is glory? The same love of others, a desire to do something for them, a desire for their approval.—So I lived for others, and not almost, but quite, ruined my life. And I have become calmer since I began to live only for myself.”
― Leo Tolstoy, War and Peace

“Just as I could not stand his terrible physical labor but should die of it in a week, so he could not stand my physical idleness, but would grow fat and die.”
― Leo Tolstoy, War and Peace

“If once we begin judging and arguing about everything, nothing sacred will be left! That way we shall be saying there is no God—nothing!”
― Leo Tolstoy, War and Peace

“At that meeting he was struck for the first time by the endless variety of men’s minds, which prevents a truth from ever presenting itself identically to two persons. Even those members who seemed to be on his side understood him in their own way with limitations and alterations he could not agree to, as what he always wanted most was to convey his thought to others just as he himself understood it.”
― Leo Tolstoy, War and Peace

“my dear sir, it is only in the midst of worldly cares that we can attain our three chief aims: (1) Self-knowledge—for man can only know himself by comparison, (2) Self-perfecting, which can only be attained by conflict, and (3)”
― Leo Tolstoy, War and Peace

“my dear sir, it is only in the midst of worldly cares that we can attain our three chief aims: (1) Self-knowledge—for man can only know himself by comparison, (2) Self-perfecting, which can only be attained by conflict, and (3) The attainment of the chief virtue—love of death.”
― Leo Tolstoy, War and Peace