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Every person has only one purpose: to find perfection in goodness. Therefore, only that knowledge is necessary which leads to this.

— Leo Tolstoy

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Good and Evil

More quotes by Leo Tolstoy

I cannot recall those years without horror, loathing, and heart-rending pain.

Confession (1882)

Art is a human activity having for its purpose the transmission to others of the highest and best feelings to which men have risen.

What is Art? (1897)

The strongest of all warriors are these two — Time and Patience.

War and Peace (1865)

The vocation of every man and woman is to serve other people.

What Is To Be Done? (1886)

God is that infinite All of which man knows himself to be a finite part.
God alone exists truly. Man manifests Him in time, space and matter.

All Leo Tolstoy quotes →

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False words are not only evil in themselves, but they infect the soul with evil.

Socrates

I believe in evil. It is the property of all those who are certain of truth. Despair and fanaticism are only differing manifestations of evil.

Edward Teller

Of all tyrannies a tyranny sincerely exercised for the good of its victims may be the most oppressive.

C. S. Lewis God in the Dock (1970)

There are a thousand hacking at the branches of evil to one who is striking at the root, and it may be that he who bestows the largest amount of time and money on the needy is doing the most by his mode of life to produce that misery which he strives in vain to relieve.

Henry David Thoreau Walden (1854)

Attribution

Quote text and notes from Wikiquote: Leo Tolstoy (page history), available under CC BY-SA 4.0. Source quality and labels are our own summary of what Wikiquote records.