Leo Tolstoy Quotes

Work is the inevitable condition of human life the true source of human welfare.
Leo Tolstoy
Regard the society of women as a necessary unpleasantness of social life and avoid it as much as possible.
Leo Tolstoy
There is no greatness where there is not simplicity.
Leo Tolstoy
I am used to praying when I am alone thank God. But when I come together with other people when I need more than ever to pray I still cannot get used to it.
Leo Tolstoy
Happiness does not depend on outward things but on the way we see them.
Leo Tolstoy
Music is the shorthand of emotion.
Leo Tolstoy
I am used to praying when I am alone thank God. But when I come together with other people when I need more than ever to pray I still cannot get used to it.
Leo Tolstoy
Happiness does not depend on outward things but on the way we see them.
Leo Tolstoy
Music is the shorthand of emotion.
Leo Tolstoy
Never did Christ utter a single word attesting to a personal resurrection and a life beyond the grave.
Leo Tolstoy
Happiness does not depend on outward things but on the way we see them.
Leo Tolstoy
Man is meant for happiness and this happiness is in him in the satisfaction of the daily needs of his existence.
Leo Tolstoy
All happy families resemble one another every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way.
Leo Tolstoy
Faith is the force of life.
Leo Tolstoy
To love one's neighbors to love one's enemies to love everything - to love God in all His manifestations - human love serves to love those dear to us but to love one's enemies we need divine love.
Leo Tolstoy
The strongest of all warriors are these two-Time and Patience.
Leo Tolstoy
Everybody thinks of changing humanity and nobody thinks of changing himself.
Leo Tolstoy
Christianity with its doctrine of humility of forgiveness of love is incompatible with the state with its haughtiness its violence its punishment its wars.
Leo Tolstoy
Boredom: the desire for desires.
Leo Tolstoy
It is amazing how complete is the delusion that beauty is goodness.
Leo Tolstoy
Art is a human activity consisting in this that one man consciously by means of external signs hands on to others feelings he has worked through and other people are infected by these feelings and also experience them.
Leo Tolstoy
There are no conditions to which a man cannot become accustomed.
Leo Tolstoy
There are no conditions to which a man cannot become used, especially if he sees that all around him are living in the same way.
Leo Tolstoy
Everyone had something disparaging to say about the unfortunate Maltyshcheva, and the conversation began crackling merrily like a kindling bonfire.
Leo Tolstoy
He disliked contradiction, and still more, arguments that were continually skipping from one thing to another, introducing new and disconnected points, so that there was no knowing to which to reply.
Leo Tolstoy
he was one of those diplomats who like and know how to work, and, despite his laziness, he occasionally spent nights at his desk.
Leo Tolstoy
My field was God’s earth. Wherever I ploughed, there was my field. Land was free. It was a thing no man called his own. Labor was the only thing men called their own.
Leo Tolstoy
I keep finding myself confronted with the question, “What is the aim of man’s life?” and, no matter what result my reflections reach, no matter what I take to be life’s source, I invariably arrive at the conclusion that the purpose of our human existence is to afford a maximum of help towards the universal development of everything that exists.If I meditate as I contemplate nature, I perceive everything in nature to be in constant process of development, and each of nature’s constituent portions to be unconsciously contributing towards the development of others. But man is, though a like portion of nature, a portion gifted with consciousness, and therefore bound, like the other portions, to make conscious use of his spiritual faculties in striving for the development of everything existent.If I meditate as I contemplate history, I perceive the whole human race to be for ever aspiring towards the same end.If I meditate on reason, if I pass in review man’s spiritual faculties, I find the soul of every man to have in it the same unconscious aspiration, the same imperative demand of the spirit.If I meditate with an eye upon the history of philosophy, I find everywhere, and always, men to have arrived at the conclusion that the aim of human life is the universal development of humanity.If I meditate with an eye upon theology, I find almost every nation to be cognizant of a perfect existence towards which it is the aim of mankind to aspire.So I too shall be safe in taking for the aim of my existence a conscious striving for the universal development of everything existent. I should be the unhappiest of mortals if I could not find a purpose for my life, and a purpose at once universal and useful… Wherefore henceforth all my life must be a constant, active striving for that one purpose.
Leo Tolstoy
What is reason given me for, if I am not to use it to avoid bringing unhappy beings into the world!
Leo Tolstoy
Read the best books first, otherwise you’ll find you do not have time. - Henry David Thoreau
Leo Tolstoy
This is dreadful! Not the suffering and death of the animals, but that man suppresses in himself, unnecessarily, the highest spiritual capacity—that of sympathy and pity toward living creatures like himself—and by violating his own feelings becomes cruel. And how deeply seated in the human heart is the injunction not to take life!
Leo Tolstoy
Be bad, but at least don't be a liar, a deceiver!
Leo Tolstoy
The two girls used to meet several times a day, and every time they met, Kitty's eyes said: "Who are you? What are you? Are you really the exquisite creature I imagine you to be? But for goodness' sake don't suppose," her eyes added, "that I would force my acquaintance on you, I simply admire you and like you.""I like you too, and you're very, very sweet. And I should like you better still, if I had time," answered the eyes of the unknown girl.
Leo Tolstoy
They were dealt with as in war, and they naturally employed the means that were used against them.
Leo Tolstoy
A man could not be prevented from making himself a big wax doll, and kissing it. But if the man were to come with the doll and sit before a man in love, and begin caressing his doll as the lover caressed the woman he loved, it would be distastefulto the lover. Just such a distasteful sensation was what Mihailov felt at the sight of Vronsky’s painting: he felt it both ludicrous and irritating, both pitiable and offensive.
Leo Tolstoy
The animalism of the brute nature in man is disgusting', he thought, 'but as long as it remains in its naked form we observe it from the height of our spiritual life and despise it; and - whether one has fallen or resisted - one remains what one was before. But when that same animalism hides under a cloak of poetry and aesthetic feeling and demands our worship - then we are swallowed up by it completely and worship animalism, no longer distinguishing good from evil. Then it is awful!
Leo Tolstoy
A man on a thousand mile walk has to forget his goal and say to himself every morning, 'Today I'm going to cover twenty-five miles and then rest up and sleep.
Leo Tolstoy
The very same thing, don't you see, may be looked at tragically, and turned into a misery, or it may be looked at simply and even humorously. Possibly you are inclined to look at things too tragically.
Leo Tolstoy
...there was apparent in all a sort of anxiety, a softening of the heart, and a consciousness of some great, unfathomable mystery being accomplished... the most solemn mystery in the world was being accomplished. Evening passed, night came on. And the feeling of suspense and softening of the heart before the unfathomable did not wane, but grew more intense. No one slept.
Leo Tolstoy
Perhaps it's because I appreciate all I have so much that I don't worry about what I haven't got.
Leo Tolstoy
The Lord had given them the day and the Lord had given them the strength. And the day and the strength had been dedicated to labor, and the labor was its reward. Who was the labor for? What would be its fruits? These were irrelevant and idle questions.
Leo Tolstoy
Though the doctors treated him, let his blood, and gave him medications to drink, he nevertheless recovered.
Leo Tolstoy
Just when the question of how to live had become clearer to him, a new insoluble problem presented itself - Death.
Leo Tolstoy
When the peasants and their song had vanished from his sight and hearing, a heavy feeling of anguish at his loneliness, his bodily idleness, his hostility to this world, came over him...It was all drowned in the sea of cheerful common labor. God had given the day, God had given the strength. Both day and strength had been devoted to labour and in that lay the reward...Levin had often admired this life, had often experienced a feeling of envy for the people who lived this life, but that day for the first time...the thought came clearly to Levin that it was up to him to change that so burdensome, idle, artificial and individual life he lived into this laborious, pure and common, lovely life.
Leo Tolstoy
Patriotism , as a feeling of exclusive love for one's own people, and as a doctrine of tile virtue of sacrificing one's tranquillity, one's property, and ever, one's life, in defence of one's own people from slaughter and outrage by their enemies, was the highest idea of the period when each nation considered it feasible and just, for its own advantage, to subject to slaughter and outrage the people of other nations.
Leo Tolstoy
Patriotism and its results--wars--give an enormous revenue to the newspaper trade, and profits to many other trades. Every writer, teacher, and professor is more secure in his place the more he preaches patriotism. Every Emperor and King obtains the more fame the more he is addicted to patriotism.
Leo Tolstoy
The ruling classes have in their hands the army, money, the schools, the churches, and the press. In the schools, they kindle patriotism in the children by means of histories describing their own people as the best of all peoples and always in the right. Among adults they kindle it by spectacles, jubilees, monuments, and by a lying patriotic press. Above all, they inflame patriotism in this way: perpetrating every kind of harshness and injustice against other nations, they provoke in them enmity towards their own people, and then in turn exploit that enmity to embitter their people against the foreigner.
Leo Tolstoy
It would, therefore, seem obvious that patriotism as a feeling is bad and harmful, and as a doctrine is stupid. For it is clear that if each people and each State considers itself the best of peoples and States, they all live in a gross and harmful delusion.
Leo Tolstoy
Patriotism in its simplest, clearest and most indubitable signification is nothing else but a means of obtaining for the rulers their ambitions and covetous desires, and for the ruled the abdication of human dignity, reason, conscience, and a slavish enthrallment to those in power.
Leo Tolstoy
Well, what of it? I've not given up thinking of death. It's true that it's high time I was dead; and that all this is nonsense. It's the truth I'm telling you. I do value my idea and my work awfully; but in reality only consider this: all this world of ours is nothing but a speck of mildew, which has grown up on a tiny planet. And for us to suppose we can have something great - ideas, work - it's all dust and ashes.
Leo Tolstoy
Man can be master of nothing while he fears death, but he who does not fear it possesses all. If there were no suffering, man would not know his limitations, would not know himself. The hardest thing is to be able in your soul to unite the meaning of all. To unite all? Pierre asked himself. "No, not to unite. Thoughts cannot be united, but to harness all these thoughts together is what we need! Yes, one must harness them, must harness them!
Leo Tolstoy
But that's the whole aim of civilization: to make everything a source of enjoyment.
Leo Tolstoy
He stepped down, avoiding any long look at her as one avoids long looks at the sun, but seeing her as one sees the sun, without looking.
Leo Tolstoy
It's not given to people to judge what's right or wrong. People have eternally been mistaken and will be mistaken, and in nothing more than in what they consider right and wrong.
Leo Tolstoy
As often happens between people who have chosen different ways, each of them, while rationally justifying the other's activity, despised it in his heart. To each of them it seemed that the life he led was the only real life, and the one his friend led was a mere illusion.
Leo Tolstoy
There will be today, there will be tomorrow, there will be always, and there was yesterday, and there was the day before...
Leo Tolstoy
He never chooses an opinion, he just wears whatever happens to be in style.
Leo Tolstoy
He was a passionate adherent of the new ideas and of Speransky, and the busiest purveyor of news in Petersburg, one of those men who choose their opinions like their clothes—according to the fashion—but for that very reason seem the most vehement partisans
Leo Tolstoy
Why nowadays there's a new fashion every day.
Leo Tolstoy
He was nine years old; he was a child; he he knew his own soul, it was precious to him, he guarded it as the eyelid guards the eye, and without the key of love he let no one into his soul.
Leo Tolstoy