Happy families are all alike; every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way.
Public domain. This passage is in the public domain. Leo Tolstoy died in 1910 and the translator, Constance Garnett, died in 1946, more than 70 years ago, and the work was first published in 1878. You can copy, print, read aloud or sell it without asking permission; a credit is kind but not required. The text is copied word for word from the Project Gutenberg edition linked here.
O brave new worldThat has such people in ’t!
My heart leaps up when I beholdA rainbow in the sky:So was it when my life began;So is it now I am a man;So be it when I shall grow old,Or let me die!The Child is father of the Man;And I could wish my days to beBound each to each by natural piety.
Our birth is but a sleep and a forgetting:The Soul that rises with us, our life’s Star,Hath had elsewhere its setting,And cometh from afar:Not in entire forgetfulness,And not in utter nakedness,But trailing clouds of glory do we comeFrom God, who is our home:
You see, Wendy, when the first baby laughed for the first time, its laugh broke into a thousand pieces, and they all went skipping about, and that was the beginning of fairies.
All we can know is that we know nothing. And that’s the height of human wisdom.
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