Cardinal Richelieu Quotes
French - Clergyman September 9, 1585 - December 4, 1642

If you give me six lines written by the hand of the most honest of men, I will find something in them which will hang him.
Cardinal Richelieu

War is one of the scourges with which it has pleased God to afflict men.
Cardinal Richelieu

To know how to dissimulate is the knowledge of kings.
Cardinal Richelieu

Secrecy is the first essential in affairs of state.
Cardinal Richelieu

Carry on any enterprise as if all future success depended on it.
Cardinal Richelieu

Secrecy is the first essential in affairs of the State.
Cardinal Richelieu



Leo Tolstoy Quotes
Russian - Novelist September 9, 1828 - November 20, 1910

The two most powerful warriors are patience and time.
Leo Tolstoy

The sole meaning of life is to serve humanity.
Leo Tolstoy

Everyone thinks of changing the world, but no one thinks of changing himself.
Leo Tolstoy

There is no greatness where there is no simplicity, goodness and truth.
Leo Tolstoy

Art is not a handicraft, it is the transmission of feeling the artist has experienced.
Leo Tolstoy

If you want to be happy, be.
Leo Tolstoy

An arrogant person considers himself perfect. This is the chief harm of arrogance. It interferes with a person's main task in life - becoming a better person.
Leo Tolstoy

Joy can only be real if people look upon their life as a service and have a definite object in life outside themselves and their personal happiness.
Leo Tolstoy

All happy families resemble one another, each unhappy family is unhappy in its own way.
Leo Tolstoy

Music is the shorthand of emotion.
Leo Tolstoy

In the name of God, stop a moment, cease your work, look around you.
Leo Tolstoy

Nietzsche was stupid and abnormal.
Leo Tolstoy

It is amazing how complete is the delusion that beauty is goodness.
Leo Tolstoy

True life is lived when tiny changes occur.
Leo Tolstoy

I sit on a man's back, choking him and making him carry me, and yet assure myself and others that I am very sorry for him and wish to ease his lot by all possible means - except by getting off his back.
Leo Tolstoy

Truth, like gold, is to be obtained not by its growth, but by washing away from it all that is not gold.
Leo Tolstoy

All, everything that I understand, I understand only because I love.
Leo Tolstoy

Without knowing what I am and why I am here, life is impossible.
Leo Tolstoy

We lost because we told ourselves we lost.
Leo Tolstoy

Boredom: the desire for desires.
Leo Tolstoy

And all people live, Not by reason of any care they have for themselves, But by the love for them that is in other people.
Leo Tolstoy

All violence consists in some people forcing others, under threat of suffering or death, to do what they do not want to do.
Leo Tolstoy

The changes in our life must come from the impossibility to live otherwise than according to the demands of our conscience not from our mental resolution to try a new form of life.
Leo Tolstoy

One of the first conditions of happiness is that the link between Man and Nature shall not be broken.
Leo Tolstoy

If so many men, so many minds, certainly so many hearts, so many kinds of love.
Leo Tolstoy

The greater the state, the more wrong and cruel its patriotism, and the greater is the sum of suffering upon which its power is founded.
Leo Tolstoy

A man can live and be healthy without killing animals for food; therefore, if he eats meat, he participates in taking animal life merely for the sake of his appetite.
Leo Tolstoy

War is so unjust and ugly that all who wage it must try to stifle the voice of conscience within themselves.
Leo Tolstoy

The chief difference between words and deeds is that words are always intended for men for their approbation, but deeds can be done only for God.
Leo Tolstoy

He never chooses an opinion; he just wears whatever happens to be in style.
Leo Tolstoy

Even in the valley of the shadow of death, two and two do not make six.
Leo Tolstoy

The law condemns and punishes only actions within certain definite and narrow limits; it thereby justifies, in a way, all similar actions that lie outside those limits.
Leo Tolstoy

Faith is the sense of life, that sense by virtue of which man does not destroy himself, but continues to live on. It is the force whereby we live.
Leo Tolstoy

Historians are like deaf people who go on answering questions that no one has asked them.
Leo Tolstoy

In all history there is no war which was not hatched by the governments, the governments alone, independent of the interests of the people, to whom war is always pernicious even when successful.
Leo Tolstoy

We must not only cease our present desire for the growth of the state, but we must desire its decrease, its weakening.
Leo Tolstoy

If there existed no external means for dimming their consciences, one-half of the men would at once shoot themselves, because to live contrary to one's reason is a most intolerable state, and all men of our time are in such a state.
Leo Tolstoy

Government is an association of men who do violence to the rest of us.
Leo Tolstoy

Our body is a machine for living. It is organized for that, it is its nature. Let life go on in it unhindered and let it defend itself.
Leo Tolstoy

To say that a work of art is good, but incomprehensible to the majority of men, is the same as saying of some kind of food that it is very good but that most people can't eat it.
Leo Tolstoy

Man lives consciously for himself, but is an unconscious instrument in the attainment of the historic, universal, aims of humanity.
Leo Tolstoy

War on the other hand is such a terrible thing, that no man, especially a Christian man, has the right to assume the responsibility of starting it.
Leo Tolstoy


Mary Hunter Austin Quotes
American - Writer September 9, 1868 - August 13, 1934

This is the sense of the desert hills, that there is room enough and time enough.
Mary Hunter Austin

People would be surprised to know how much I learned about prayer from playing poker.
Mary Hunter Austin

Over the tops of it, beginning to dusk under a young white moon, trailed a wavering ghost of smoke, and at the end of it I came upon the Pocket Hunter making a dry camp in the friendly scrub.
Mary Hunter Austin

What women have to stand on squarely is not their ability to see the world in the way men see it, but the importance and validity of their seeing it in some other way.
Mary Hunter Austin

Probably we never fully credit the interdependence of wild creatures, and their cognizance of the affairs of their own kind.
Mary Hunter Austin

Man is a great blunderer going about in the woods, and there is no other except the bear makes so much noise.
Mary Hunter Austin

Nevertheless there are certain peaks, canons, and clear meadow spaces which are above all compassing of words, and have a certain fame as of the nobly great to whom we give no familiar names.
Mary Hunter Austin

To underestimate one's thirst, to pass a given landmark to the right or left, to find a dry spring where one looked for running water - there is no help for any of these things.
Mary Hunter Austin

Nothing the desert produces expresses it better than the unhappy growth of the tree yuccas.
Mary Hunter Austin

For one thing there is the divinest, cleanest air to be breathed anywhere in God's world.
Mary Hunter Austin

Death by starvation is slow.
Mary Hunter Austin

I suppose no man becomes a pocket hunter by first intention.
Mary Hunter Austin

No man can be stronger than his destiny.
Mary Hunter Austin

The manner of the country makes the usage of life there, and the land will not be lived in except in its own fashion.
Mary Hunter Austin



Ralph Hodgson Quotes
English - Poet September 9, 1871 - November 3, 1962


Did anyone ever have a boring dream?
Ralph Hodgson

Time, you old gypsy man, will you not stay, put up your caravan just for one day?
Ralph Hodgson

Some things have to be believed to be seen.
Ralph Hodgson

The handwriting on the wall may be a forgery.
Ralph Hodgson


Cesare Pavese Quotes
Italian - Poet September 9, 1908 - August 27, 1950


We do not remember days, we remember moments.
Cesare Pavese

The richness of life lies in memories we have forgotten.
Cesare Pavese

Life is pain and the enjoyment of love is an anesthetic.
Cesare Pavese

No woman marries for money; they are all clever enough, before marrying a millionaire, to fall in love with him first.
Cesare Pavese

If you wish to travel far and fast, travel light. Take off all your envies, jealousies, unforgiveness, selfishness and fears.
Cesare Pavese

Lessons are not given, they are taken.
Cesare Pavese

No one ever lacks a good reason for suicide.
Cesare Pavese

Every luxury must be paid for, and everything is a luxury, starting with being in this world.
Cesare Pavese

Give me the ready hand rather than the ready tongue.
Cesare Pavese

Living is like working out a long addition sum, and if you make a mistake in the first two totals you will never find the right answer. It means involving oneself in a complicated chain of circumstances.
Cesare Pavese

The closing years of life are like the end of a masquerade party, when the masks are dropped.
Cesare Pavese

The art of living is the art of knowing how to believe lies.
Cesare Pavese

The only joy in the world is to begin.
Cesare Pavese

A man is never completely alone in this world. At the worst, he has the company of a boy, a youth, and by and by a grown man - the one he used to be.
Cesare Pavese

Hate is always a clash between our spirit and someone else's body.
Cesare Pavese

One stops being a child when one realizes that telling one's trouble does not make it any better.
Cesare Pavese

If it were possible to have a life absolutely free from every feeling of sin, what a terrifying vacuum it would be.
Cesare Pavese

He knows not his own strength that hath not met adversity.
Cesare Pavese

It is not that the child lives in a world of imagination, but that the child within us survives and starts into life only at rare moments of recollection, which makes us believe, and it is not true, that, as children, we were imaginative?
Cesare Pavese

One does not kill oneself for love of a woman, but because love - any love - reveals us in our nakedness, our misery, our vulnerability, our nothingness.
Cesare Pavese

Love is the cheapest of religions.
Cesare Pavese

Will power is only the tensile strength of one's own disposition. One cannot increase it by a single ounce.
Cesare Pavese

One must look for one thing only, to find many.
Cesare Pavese

All sins have their origin in a sense of inferiority otherwise called ambition.
Cesare Pavese

Artists are the monks of the bourgeois state.
Cesare Pavese