Leo Tolstoy Quotations

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

The two most powerful warriors are patience and time.

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

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

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

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.

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.

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

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

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

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.

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

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.

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

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.

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

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.

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

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.

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

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

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.

True life is lived when tiny changes occur.

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.

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.

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

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

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.

We lost because we told ourselves we lost.

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

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.

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

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.

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

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.

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

I am convinced that the teaching of the church is in theory a crafty and evil lie, and in practice a concoction of gross superstition and witchcraft

If it is true that there are as many minds as there are heads, then there are as many kinds of love as there are hearts.

Some mathematician has said pleasure lies not in discovering truth, but in seeking it.

It is easier to produce ten volumes of philosophical writing than to put one principle into practice

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

The more is given the less the people will work for themselves, and the less they work the more their poverty will increase.

What a strange illusion it is to suppose that beauty is goodness! A beautiful woman utters absurdities: we listen, and we hear not the absurdities but wise thoughts

The more is given the less people will work for themselves, and the less they work the more their poverty will increase

The only thing that we know is that we know nothing and that is the highest flight of human wisdom.

A Frenchman is self-assured because he regards himself personally both in mind and body as irresistibly attractive to men and women. An Englishman is self-assured as being a citizen of the best-organized state in the world and therefore, as an Englishman, always knows what he should do and knows that all he does as an Englishman is undoubtedly correct. An Italian is self-assured because he is excitable and easily forgets himself and other people. A Russian is self-assured just because he knows nothing and does not want to know anything, since he does not believe that anything can be known. The German's self-assurance is worst of all, stronger and more repulsive than any other, because he imagines that he knows the truth -- science -- which he himself has invented but which is for him the absolute truth.

I know that most men, including those at ease with problems of thegreatest complexity, can seldom accept even the simplest and mostobvious truth if it be such as would oblige them to admit the falsityof conclusions which they have delighted in explaining to colleagues,which they have proudly taught to others, and which they have woven,thread by thread, into the fabric of their lives.

If one loves, one loves the whole person as he or she is, and not as one might wish them to be.

In saying that without the power of the state, evil men would rule over the good. It is taken for granted that the good are precisely those who at the present time have power, and the bad the same who are no subjugated.

A peasant dies calmly because he is not a Christian. He performs the rituals as a matter of course, but his true religion is different. His religion is nature, with which he has lived.

In quiet and untroubled times it seems to every administrator that it is only by his efforts that the whole population under his rule is kept going, and in this consciousness of being indispensable every administrator finds the chief reward of his labor and efforts. While the sea of history remains calm the ruler-administrator in his frail bark, holding on with a boat hook to the ship of the people and himself moving, naturally imagines that his efforts move the ship he is holding on to. But as soon as a storm arises and the sea begins to heave and the ship to move, such a delusion is no longer possible. The ship moves independently with its own enormous motion, the boat hook no longer reaches the moving vessel, and suddenly the administrator, instead of appearing a ruler and a source of power, becomes an insignificant, useless, feeble man.

Church teachings are but fiction. I have knowledge of their inanity.

He sends a cross, but He also sends the strength to bear it.

All happy families are alike; each unhappy family is unhappy in its own way

The first glass you drive in like a stake, the second flies like a crake, and after the third they fly like wee little birds.

It is true, I deny the incomprehensible Trinity, and the fable regarding the fall of man, which is absurd in our day. It is true, I deny the sacrilegious story of a God born of a virgin to redeem the race.

The whole trouble lies in that people think that there are conditions excluding the necessity of love in their intercourse with man, but such conditions do not exist. Things may be treated without love; one may chop wood, make bricks, forge iron without love, but one can no more deal with people without love than one can handle bees without care.

My piece of bread only belongs to me when I know that everyone else has a share, and that no one starves while I eat.

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.

Everyone wants to change the world, but nobody wants to change himself.

What counts in making a happy marriage is not so much how compatible you are but how you deal with incompatibility.

Love alone is the only reasonable activity or pursuit of humankind....Fo r Love not only annihilates our fear of meaninglessness but empowers us to seek the happiness of others. And this indeed is our greatest happiness.

It is not beauty that endears, it's love that makes us see beauty.

The most difficult subjects can be explained to the most slow- witted man if he has not formed any idea of them already; but the simplest thing cannot be made clear to the most intelligent man if he is firmly persuaded that he knows already, without a shadow of doubt, what is laid before him.

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

The key to success in life is using the good thoughts of wise people.

Men pray to the Almighty to relieve poverty. But poverty comes not from God's laws-it is blasphemy of the worst kind to say that. Poverty comes from man's injustice to his fellow man.

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.

If you want to be happy, be.

Once we're thrown off our habitual paths, we think all is lost, but it's only here that the new and the good begins.

A free thinker used to be a man who had been educated on ideas of religion, law, morality, and had arrived at free thought by virtue of his own struggle and toil; but now a new type of born freethinker has been appearing, who’ve never even heard that there have been laws of morality and religion, and that there are authorities, but who simply grow up with negative ideas about everything, that is savages.

What a strange illusion it is to suppose that beauty is goodness.

Which is worse? the wolf who cries before eating the lamb or the wolf who does not.

There is something in the human spirit that will survive and prevail, there is a tiny and brilliant light burning in the heart of man that will not go out no matter how dark the world becomes.

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

History, that is to say, the unconscious, universal life of humanity, in the aggregate, every moment profits by the life of kings for itself, as an instrument for the accomplishment of its own ends.

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.

Something magical has happened to me: like a dream when one feels frightened and creepy, and suddenly wakes up to the knowledge that no such terrors exist. I have wakened up.

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

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

Happiness is in your ability to love others.

Freethinkers are those who are willing to use their minds without prejudice and without fearing to understand things that clash with their own customs, privileges, or beliefs. This state of mind is not common, but it is essential for right thinking...

The struggle with evil by means of violence is the same as an attempt to stop a cloud, in order that there may be no rain.

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

A quiet secluded life in the country, with the possibility of being useful to people to whom it is easy to do good, and who are not accustomed to have it done to them; then work which one hopes may be of some use; then rest, nature, books, music, love for one's neighbor — such is my idea of happiness.

The great tragedy of atheists is that they walk through this world and have no one to thank.

A man is like a fraction whose numerator is what he is and whose denominator is what he thinks of himself. The larger the denominator, the smaller the fraction.

Everything depends on upbringing.

Boredom: the desire for desires.

It's too easy to criticize a man when he's out of favour, and to make him shoulder the blame for everybody else's mistakes.

If you no longer believe in the God in whom you believed in before, this comes from the fact that there was something wrong with your belief, and you must strive to understand better that which you call God.

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

Happiness is pleasure without regret

Only people who are capable of loving strongly can also suffer great sorrow, but this same necessity of loving serves to counteract their grief and heals them.

A person who has spoiled his stomach will criticize his meal saying that the food is bad; the same thing happens with people who are not satisfied with their lives

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.

Money is a new form of slavery, and distinguishable from the old simply by the fact that it is impersonal - that there is no human relation between master and slave.