This, for both Schopenhauer and Tolstoy, is the central tragedy of human life; if only men would learn how little the cleverest and most gifted among them can control, how little they can know of all the multitude of factors the orderly movement of which is the history of the world; above all, what presumptuous nonsense it is to claim to perceive an order merely on the strength of believing desperately that an order must exist, when all one actually perceives is meaningless chaos —a chaos of which the heightened form, the microcosm in which the disorder of human life is reflected in an intense degree, is war. Isaiah Berlin
Some Similar Quotes
  1. I've always loved you, and when you love someone, you love the whole person, just as he or she is, and not as you would like them to be. - Leo Tolstoy
  2. Freddie experienced the sort of abysmal soul-sadness which afflicts one of Tolstoy's Russian peasants when, after putting in a heavy day's work strangling his father, beating his wife, and dropping the baby into the city's reservoir, he turns to the cupboards, only to find the... - P.g. Wodehouse
  3. The same Sermon on the Mount that influenced Tolstoy to write “The Kingdom of God is Within You”, inspired me to a great extent in my work “Principia Humanitas”. - Abhijit Naskar
  4. Only a handful of individuals in human history can be truly hailed as Christians, such as Tolstoy, Gandhi, Mother Teresa, Rumi, Martin Luther King Jr. and a few others. - Abhijit Naskar
  5. ..And there really are men who believe in this, who spend their time in promoting Leagues of Peace, in delivering addresses, and in writing books; and of course the governments sympathize with it all, pretending that they approve of it; just as they pretend to... - Leo Tolstoy
More Quotes By Isaiah Berlin
  1. Men would no longer be victims of nature or of their own largely irrational societies: reason would triumph; universal harmonious cooperation, true history, would at last begin. For if this was not so, do the ideas of progress, of history, have any meaning? Is there...
  2. The view that the truth is one and undivided, and the same for all men everywhere at all times, whether one finds it in the pronouncements of sacred books, traditional wisdom, the authority of churches, democratic majorities, observation and experiment conducted by qualified experts, or...
  3. The fox knows many things, but the hedgehog knows one big thing.
  4. Freedom for the wolves has often meant death to the sheep.
  5. Tolstoy was perfectly right to protest that history is not made to happen by the combination of such obscure entities as the ‘power’ or ‘mental activity’ assumed by naïve historians; indeed he was, in Kareev’s view, at his best when he denounced the tendency of...
Related Topics