Leo Tolstoy Life Quotations

The two most powerful warriors are patience and time.

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

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.

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

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

True life is lived when tiny changes occur.

The sole meaning of life is to serve humanity.

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.

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

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

Wrong does not cease to be wrong because the majority share in it.

Love is life. All, everything that I understand, I understand only because I love. Everything is, everything exists, only because I love. Everything is united by it alone. Love is God, and to die means that I, a particle of love, shall return to the general and eternal source.

Seize the moments of happiness, love and be loved! That is the only reality in the world, all else is folly.

Christian love comes from the understanding that there is a unity of divine origins in oneself and in other people, and not only in people, but in all living things.

When you love someone, you love the person as they are, and not as you'd like them to be.

Nothing is so necessary for a young man as the company of intelligent women.

Be bad, but at least don't be a liar, a deceiver!

If he be really and seriously seeking to live a good life, the first thing from which he will abstain will always be the use of animal food, because ...its use is simply immoral, as it involves the performance of an act which is contrary to the moral feeling - killing.

He felt now that he was not simply close to her, but that he did not know where he ended and she began.

All the variety, all the charm, all the beauty of life is made up of light and shadow.

Each person's task in life is to become an increasingly better person.

We can know only that we know nothing. And that is the highest degree of human wisdom.

Rummaging in our souls, we often dig up something that ought to have lain there unnoticed.

The more we live by our intellect, the less we understand the meaning of life.

If, then, I were asked for the most important advice I could give, that which I considered to be the most useful to the men of our century, I should simply say: in the name of God, stop a moment, cease your work, look around you.

Real wisdom is not the knowledge of everything, but the knowledge of which things in life are necessary, which are less necessary, and which are completely unnecessary to know.

There are no conditions to which a person cannot grow accustomed, especially if he sees that everyone around him lives in the same way.

What are wanted ...are not Constitutions and Revolutions, nor all sorts of Conferences and Congresses, nor the many ingenious devices for submarine navigation and aerial navigation, nor powerful explosives, nor all sorts of conveniences to add to the enjoyment of the rich, ruling classes... but one thing only is needful: the knowledge of the simple and clear truth ...that for our life one law is valid - the law of love, which brings the highest happiness to every individual as well as to all mankind.

As soon as men live entirely in accord with the law of love natural to their hearts and now revealed to them, which excludes all resistance by violence, and therefore hold aloof from all participation in violence - as soon as this happens, not only will hundreds be unable to enslave millions, but not even millions will be able to enslave a single individual.

One can live magnificently in this world if one knows how to work and how to love.

Is it really possible to tell someone else what one feels?

For if we allow that human life is always guided by reason, we destroy the premise that life is possible at all.

If we admit that human life can be ruled by reason, then all possibility of life is destroyed.

The idea shared by many that life is a vale of tears is just as false as the idea shared by the great majority, the idea to which youth and health and riches incline you, that life is a place of entertainment.

Life is fragile and absurd.

Each time of life has its own kind of love.

Art lifts man from his personal life into the universal life.

If you look for perfection, you'll never be content.

For man to be able to live he must either not see the infinite, or have such an explanation of the meaning of life as will connect the finite with the infinite.

The meaning of life consists in the love and service of God.

The happiness of men consists in life. And life is in labor.

Loving the same man or woman all your life, why, that's like supposing the same candle could last you all your life

The purpose of life is to bring forth goodness. Now, in this life.

War is not a polite recreation but the vilest thing in life, and we ought to understand that and not play at war.

I believe that the reason of life is for each of us simply to grow in love.

At moments of departure and a change of life, people capable of reflecting on their actions usually get into a serious state of mind. At these moments they usually take stock of the past and make plans for the future.

As soon as man applies his intelligence to any object at all, he unfailingly destroys the object.

Suddenly I heard the words of Christ and understood them, and life and death ceased to seem to me evil, and instead of despair I experienced happiness and the joy of life undisturbed by death.

Work is the inevitable condition of human life, the true source of human welfare.

Regard the society of women as a necessary unpleasantness of social life, and avoid it as much as possible.

Religion reveals the meaning of life, and science only applies this meaning to the course of circumstances.

What is important is not the length of life, but the depth of life. What is important is not to make life longer, but to take your soul out of time, as every sublime act does

Grow spiritually and help others to do so. It is the meaning of life.

My life had come to a sudden stop. I was able to breathe, to eat, to drink, to sleep. I could not, indeed help doing so; but there was no real life in me.

He was right in saying that the only certain happiness in life is to live for others.

but my life now, my whole life apart from anything that can happen to me, every minute of it is no more meaningless, as it was before, but it has the positive meaning of goodness, which I have the power to put into it.

We should show life neither as it is or as it ought to be, but only as we see it in our dreams.

To get rid of an enemy one must love him.

I don’t count life as life without love

I looked more widely around me, I studied the lives of the masses of humanity, and I saw that, not two or three, or ten, but hundreds, thousands, millions, had so understood the meaning of life that they were able both to live and to die. All these people were well acquainted with the meaning of life and death, quietly labored, endured privation and suffering, lived and died, and saw in all this, not a vain, but a good thing.

To love life is to love God. Harder and more blessed than all else is to love this life in one's sufferings, in undeserved sufferings.

When we do not love, we sleep, we are children of the dust - but love, and you are a god, you are pure, as on the first day of creation.

I have now understood that though it seems to men that they live by care for themselves, in truth it is love alone by which they live. He who has love, is in God, and God is in him, for God is love.

The artist's mission must not be to produce an irrefutable solution to a problem, but to compel us to love life in all its countless and inexhaustible manifestations.

Life is everything. Life is God. Everything shifts and moves, and this movement is God. And while there is life, there is delight in the self-awareness of the divinity. To love life is to love God. The hardest and most blissful thing is to love this life in one's suffering, in the guiltlessness of suffering.

ٰ"The Most difficult thing but an essential one – is to love Life, to love it even while one suffers, because Life is all, Life is God, and to love Life means to love God.

A wound in the soul, coming from the rending of the spiritual body, strange as it may seem, gradually closes like a physical wound. And once a deep wound heals over and the edges seem to have knit, a wound in the soul, like a physical wound, can be healed only by the force of life pushing up from inside. This was the way Natasha's wound healed. She thought her life was over. But suddenly her love for her mother showed her that the essence of life - love - was still alive in her. Love awoke, and life awoke.

You've said nothing, of course, and I ask nothing," he was saying; "but you know that friendship's not what I want: that there's only one happiness in life for me, that word that you dislike so…yes, love!…

In spite of death, he felt the need of life and love. He felt that love saved him from despair, and that this love, under the menace of despair, had become still stronger and purer. The one mystery of death, still unsolved, had scarcely passed before his eyes, when another mystery had arisen, as insoluble, urging him to love and to life.

The antagonism between life and conscience may be removed in two ways: by a change of life or by a change of conscience.

In life, in true life, there can be nothing better than what is. Wanting something different than what is, is blasphemy.

If you do not know your place in the world and the meaning of your life, you should know there is something to blame; and it is not the social system, or your intellect, but the way in which you have directed your intellect.