Leo Tolstoy quotes are thought-provoking, memorable and inspiring. From views on society and politics to thoughts on love and life, Leo Tolstoy has a lot to say. In this list we present the 405 best Leo Tolstoy quotes, in no particular order. Let yourself get inspired!
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Leo Tolstoy quotes
I think… 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.
— Leo Tolstoy, Anna Karenina
Respect was invented to cover the empty place where love should be.
— Leo Tolstoy, Anna Karenina
Love. The reason I dislike that word is that it means too much for me, far more than you can understand.”- Anna Karenina {Anna Karenina}
— Leo Tolstoy, Anna Karenina
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, Anna Karenina
They’ve got no idea what happiness is, they don’t know that without this love there is no happiness or unhappiness for us–there is no life.
— Leo Tolstoy, Anna Karenina
If you love me as you say you do, ‘ she whispered, ‘make it so that I am at peace.
— Leo Tolstoy, Anna Karenina
The whole world is divided for me into two parts: one is she, and there is all happiness, hope, light; the other is where she is not, and there is dejection and darkness…
— Leo Tolstoy, War and Peace
You can love a person dear to you with a human love, but an enemy can only be loved with divine love.
— Leo Tolstoy, War and Peace
It’s hard to love a woman and do anything.
— Leo Tolstoy, Anna Karenina
Love those you hate you.
— Leo Tolstoy, Anna Karenina
We are asleep until we fall in Love!
— Leo Tolstoy, War and Peace
He was afraid of defiling the love which filled his soul.
— Leo Tolstoy, Anna Karenina
He felt now that he was not simply close to her, but that he did not know where he ended and she began.
— Leo Tolstoy
Everything I know, I know because of love.
— Leo Tolstoy, War and Peace
I’m like a starving man who has been given food. Maybe he’s cold, and his clothes are torn, and he’s ashamed, but he’s not unhappy.
— Leo Tolstoy, Anna Karenina
I wanted movement and not a calm course of existence. I wanted excitement and danger and the chance to sacrifice myself for my love.
— Leo Tolstoy
He looked at her as a man might look at a faded flower he had plucked, in which it was difficult for him to trace the beauty that had made him pick and so destroy it
— Leo Tolstoy, Anna Karenina
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.
— Leo Tolstoy, Essays, Letters and Miscellanies
In the name of God, stop a moment, cease your work, look around you.
— Leo Tolstoy
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.
— Leo Tolstoy, Family Happiness
Pierre was right when he said that one must believe in the possibility of happiness in order to be happy, and I now believe in it. Let the dead bury the dead, but while I’m alive, I must live and be happy.
— Leo Tolstoy, War and Peace
If we admit that human life can be ruled by reason, then all possibility of life is destroyed.
— Leo Tolstoy, War and Peace
The best stories don’t come from “good vs. bad” but “good vs. good.
— Leo Tolstoy
There are no conditions to which a person cannot grow accustomed, especially if he sees that everyone around him lives in the same way.
— Leo Tolstoy, Anna Karenina
Life did not stop, and one had to live.
— Leo Tolstoy, War and Peace
And you know, there’s less charm in life when you think about death–but it’s more peaceful.
— Leo Tolstoy, Anna Karenina
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.
— Leo Tolstoy
If you want to be happy, be.
— Leo Tolstoy
Seize the moments of happiness, love and be loved! That is the only reality in the world, all else is folly. It is the one thing we are interested in here.
— Leo Tolstoy
Man cannot possess anything as long as he fears death. But to him who does not fear it, everything belongs. If there was no suffering, man would not know his limits, would not know himself.
— Leo Tolstoy, War and Peace
Without knowledge of what I am and why I am here, it is impossible to live, and since I cannot know that, I cannot live either. In an infinity of time, in an infinity of matter, and an infinity of space a bubble-organism emerges while will exist for a little time and then burst, and that bubble am I.
— Leo Tolstoy, Anna Karenina
I wanted movement and not a calm course of existence. I wanted excitement and the chance to sacrifice myself for my love. I felt it in myself a superabundance of energy which found no outlet in our quiet life.
— Leo Tolstoy, Family Happiness
One must try to make one’s life as pleasant as possible. I’m alive and it’s not my fault, which means I must somehow go on living the best I can, without bothering anybody, until I die.”But what makes you live? With such thoughts, you’ll sit without moving, without undertaking anything…”Life won’t leave one alone as it is.
— Leo Tolstoy, War and Peace
…suffering and freedom have their limits…those limits are very near together.
— Leo Tolstoy, War and Peace
Wrong does not cease to be wrong because the majority share in it.
— Leo Tolstoy, A Confession
Boredom: the desire for desires.
— Leo Tolstoy
Muhammad has always been standing higher than the Christianity. He does not consider god as a human being and never makes himself equal to God. Muslims worship nothing except God and Muhammad is his Messenger. There is no any mystery and secret in it.
— Leo Tolstoy
There is no greatness where there is not simplicity, goodness, and truth.
— Leo Tolstoy, War and Peace
To tell the truth is very difficult, and young people are rarely capable of it.
— Leo Tolstoy
And where love ends, hate begins
— Leo Tolstoy, Anna Karenina
Every man had his personal habits, passions, and impulses toward goodness, beauty, and truth.
— Leo Tolstoy, War and Peace
My life came to a standstill. I could breathe, eat, drink and sleep, and I could not help doing these things; but there was no life, for there were no wishes the fulfilment of which I could consider reasonable. If I desired anything, I knew in advance that whether I satisfied my desire or not, nothing would come of it. Had a fairy come and offered to fulfil my desires I should not have known what to ask. If in moments of intoxication I felt something which, though not a wish, was a habit left by former wishes, in sober moments I knew this to be a delusion and that there was really nothing to wish for. I could not even wish to know the truth, for I guess of what it consisted. The truth was that life is meaningless.
— Leo Tolstoy
Loving the same man or woman all your life, why, that’s like supposing the same candle could last you all your life
— Leo Tolstoy, The Kreutzer Sonata
If only [people] understood that every thought is both false and true! False by one-sidenedness resulting from man’s inability to embrace the whole truth, and true as an expression of one fact of human endeavor.
— Leo Tolstoy
No one can attain to truth by himself. Only by laying stone on stone with the cooperation of all, by the millions of generations from our forefather Adam to our own times, is that temple reared which is to be a worthy dwelling place of the Great God.
— Leo Tolstoy
Este incredibil cât de completă este iluzia care ne face să credem că frumuseţea este în genere bunătate.
— Leo Tolstoy, The Kreutzer Sonata
It’s all God’s will: you can die in your sleep, and God can spare you in battle.
— Leo Tolstoy, War and Peace
God is the same everywhere.
— Leo Tolstoy, War and Peace
He is not apprehended by reason, but by life.
— Leo Tolstoy, War and Peace
How good is it to remember one’s insignificance: that of a man among billions of men, of an animal amid billions of animals; and one’s abode, the earth, a little grain of sand in comparison with Sirius and others, and one’s life span in comparison with billions on billions of ages. There is only one significance, you are a worker. The assignment is inscribed in your reason and heart and expressed clearly and comprehensibly by the best among the beings similar to you. The reward for doing the assignment is immediately within you. But what the significance of the assignment is or of its completion, that you are not given to know, nor do you need to know it. It is good enough as it is. What else could you desire?
— Leo Tolstoy
Dumnezeu este doar unul şi acelaşi pretutindeni.
— Leo Tolstoy, War and Peace
How can it be that I’ve never seen that lofty sky before? Oh, how happy I am to have found it at last. Yes! It’s all vanity, it’s all an illusion, everything except that infinite sky. There is nothing, nothing – that’s all there is. But there isn’t even that. There’s nothing but stillness and peace. Thank God for that!
— Leo Tolstoy, War and Peace
Our life has been joined, not by man, but by God. That union can only be severed by a crime, and a crime of that nature brings its own chastisement.
— Leo Tolstoy
It is amazing how complete is the delusion that beauty is goodness.
— Leo Tolstoy, The Kreutzer Sonata
We can know only that we know nothing. And that is the highest degree of human wisdom.
— Leo Tolstoy, War and Peace
People of limited intelligence are fond of talking about “these days, ” imagining that they have discovered and appraised the peculiarities of “these days” and that human nature changes with the times.
— Leo Tolstoy
truth, like gold, is to be obtained not by its growth, but by washing away from it all that is not gold.
— Leo Tolstoy
If there is a God and future life, there is truth and good, and man’s highest happiness consists in striving to attain them. We must live, we must love, and we must believe that we live not only today on this scrap of earth, but have lived and shall live
— Leo Tolstoy, War and Peace
I led the life of so many other so-called respectable people, —that is, in debauchery. And like the majority, while leading the life of a debauche, I was convinced that I was a man of irreproachable morality.
— Leo Tolstoy, Kreutzer Sonata and Family Happiness
I have lived through much, and now I think I have found what is needed for happiness. 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. And then, on top of all that, you for a mate, and children, perhaps – what more can the heart of a man desire?
— Leo Tolstoy, Family Happiness
Happiness consists in always aspiring perfection, the pause in any level in perfection is the pause of happiness
— Leo Tolstoy
Then he thought himself unhappy, but happiness was all in the future; now he felt that the best happiness was already in the past.
— Leo Tolstoy, Anna Karenina
He had learned that, as there is no situation in the world in which a man can be happy and perfectly free, so there is no situation in which he can be perfectly unhappy and unfree.
— Leo Tolstoy, War and Peace
Vronsky saw nothing and no one. He felt himself as a king, not because she had made an impression on Anna-he did not yet believe that-but because the impression she had made on him gave him happiness and pride.
— Leo Tolstoy, Anna Karenina
Toate familiile fericite se aseamănă între ele. Fiecare familie nefericită este nefericită în felul ei.
— Leo Tolstoy, Anna Karenina
Seize the moments of happiness, Love and be Loved!That is the only reality in the world, all else is folly!
— Leo Tolstoy
In the midst of winter, I find within me the invisible summer…
— Leo Tolstoy, The Kingdom of God Is Within You
Everything ends in death, everything. Death is terrible.
— Leo Tolstoy, War and Peace
When a man sees a dying animal, horror comes over him: that which he himself is, his essence, is obviously being annihilated before his eyes–is ceasing to be. But when the dying one is a person, and a beloved person, then, besides a sense of horror at the annihilation of life, there is a feeling of severance and a spiritual wound which, like a physical wound, sometimes kills and sometimes heals, but always hurts and fears any external, irritating touch.
— Leo Tolstoy, War and Peace
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.
— Leo Tolstoy, Anna Karenina
God forgive me everything!’ she said, feeling the impossibility of struggling…
— Leo Tolstoy, Anna Karenina
It can’t be that life is so senseless and horrible. But if it really has been so horrible and senseless, why must I die and die in agony? There is something wrong!
— Leo Tolstoy, The Death of Ivan Ilych
In actuality, it was like the homes of all people who are not really rich but who want to look rich, and therefore end up looking like one another: it had damasks, ebony, plants, carpets, and bronzes, everything dark and gleaming—all the effects a certain class of people produce so as to look like people of a certain class. And his place looked so much like the others that it would never have been noticed, though it all seemed quite exceptional to him.
— Leo Tolstoy, The Death of Ivan Ilych And Other Stories
A little muzhik was working on the railroad, mumbling in his beard. And the candle by which she had read the book that was filled with fears, with deceptions, with anguish, and with evil, flared up with greater brightness than she had ever known, revealing to her all that before was in darkness, then flickered, grew faint, and went out forever.
— Leo Tolstoy, Anna Karenina
The more mental effort he made the clearer he saw that it was undoubtedly so: that he had really forgotten and overlooked one little circumstance in life – that Death would come and end everything, so that it was useless to begin anything, and that there was no help for it, Yes it was terrible but true
— Leo Tolstoy, Anna Karenina
It’s as if I had been going downhill when I thought I was going uphill. That’s how it was. In society’s opinion I was heading uphill, but in equal measure life was slipping away from me… And now it’s all over. Nothing left but to die!” “So what’s it all about? What’s it for? It’s not possible. It’s not possible that life could have been as senseless and sickening as this. And if it has really been as sickening and senseless as this why do I have to die, and die in agony? There’s something wrong. Maybe I didn’t live as I should have done?” came the sudden thought. “But how can that be when I did everything properly?” he wondered, instantly dismissing as a total impossibility the one and only solution to the mystery of life and death.
— Leo Tolstoy
But when, as is most often the case, the husband and wife accept the external obligation to live together all their lives and have, by the second month, come to loathe the sight of each other, want to get divorced and yet go on living together, it usually ends in that terrible hell that drives them to drink, makes them shoot themselves, kill and poison each other
— Leo Tolstoy, The Kreutzer Sonata
There are many faiths, but the spirit is one — in me, and in you, and in him. So that if everyone believes himself, all will be united; everyone be himself and all will be as one.
— Leo Tolstoy, Resurrection
At the time we were all convinced that we had to speak, write, and publish as quickly as possible and as much as possible and that this was necessary for the good of mankind. Thousands of us published and wrote in an effort to teach others, all the while disclaiming and abusing one another. Without taking note of the fact that we knew nothing, that we did not know the answer to the simplest question of life, the question of what is right and what is wrong, we all went on talking without listening to one another.
— Leo Tolstoy, A Confession
In everything, almost in everything, I wrote I was guided by the need of collecting ideas which, linked together, would be the expression of myself, though each individual idea, expressed separately in words, loses its meaning, is horribly debased when only one of the links, of which it forms a part, is taken by itself. But the interlinking of these ideas is not, I think, an intellectual process, but something else, and it is impossible to express the source of this interlinking directly in words; it can only be done indirectly by describing images, actions, and situations in words.
— Leo Tolstoy
If goodness has causes, it is not goodness; if it has effects, a reward, it is not goodness either. So goodness is outside the chain of cause and effect.
— Leo Tolstoy, Anna Karenina
Without the support from religion–remember, we talked about it–no father, using only his own resources, would be able to bring up a child.
— Leo Tolstoy, Anna Karenina
Well, pray if you like, only you’d do better to use your judgment.
— Leo Tolstoy, War and Peace
To know God and to live is one and the same thing. God is life.
— Leo Tolstoy
You are all misleading one another, and are yourselves deceived. The sun does not go round the earth, but the earth goes round the sun, revolving as it goes, and turning towards the sun in the course of each twenty-four hours, not only Japan, and the Philippines, and Sumatra where we now are, but Africa, and Europe, and America, and many lands besides. The sun does not shine for some one mountain, or for some one island, or for some one sea, nor even for one earth alone, but for other planets as well as our earth. If you would only look up at the heavens, instead of at the ground beneath your own feet, you might all understand this, and would then no longer suppose that the sun shines for you, or for your country alone.
— Leo Tolstoy, Eleven Stories
It never before happened that the rich ruling and more educated minority, which has the most influence on the masses, not only disbelieved the existing religion but was convinced that no religion is no longer needed.
— Leo Tolstoy, What Is Religion? and Other New Articles and Letters
To educate the peasantry, three things are needed: schools, schools and schools.
— Leo Tolstoy, Anna Karenina
We walked to meet each other up at the time of our love and then we have been irresistibly drifting in different directions, and there’s no altering that.
— Leo Tolstoy, Anna Karenina
In the best, the friendliest and simplest relations flattery or praise is necessary, just as grease is necessary to keep wheels turning.
— Leo Tolstoy, War and Peace
They ought to find out how to vaccinate for love, like smallpox.
— Leo Tolstoy, Anna Karenina
Between Countess Nordston and Levin there had been established those relations, not infrequent in society, in which two persons, while ostensibly remaining on friendly terms, are contemptuous of each other to such a degree that they cannot even treat each other seriously and cannot even insult each one another.
— Leo Tolstoy, Anna Karenina
I had begun to feel that life was a repetition of the same thing; that there was nothing new either in me or in him; and that, on the contrary, we kept going back as it were on what was old.
— Leo Tolstoy, Family Happiness
Love them that hate you, but you can’t love them whom you hate.
— Leo Tolstoy, Anna Karenina
The strongest of all warriors are these two — Time and Patience.
— Leo Tolstoy, War and Peace
I suffered most from the feeling that custom was daily petrifying our lives into one fixed shape, that our minds were losing their freedom and becoming enslaved to the steady passionless course of time.
— Leo Tolstoy, Family Happiness
Time is an illusion of life the life of the past and the future clouds men from the true life of the present.
— Leo Tolstoy
Human science fragments everything in order to understand it, kills everything in order to examine it.
— Leo Tolstoy, War and Peace
It was long before I could believe that human learning had no clear answer to this question. For a long time it seemed to me, as I listened to the gravity and seriousness wherewith Science affirmed its positions on matters unconnected with the problem of life, that I must have misunderstood something. For a long time I was timid in the presence in learning, and I fancied that the insufficiency of the answers which I received was not its fault, but was owing to my own gross ignorance, but this thing was not a joke or a pastime with me, but the business of my life, and I was at last forced, willy-nilly, to the conclusion that these questions of mine were the only legitimate questions underlying all knowledge, and that it was not I that was in fault in putting them, but science in pretending to have an answer for them.
— Leo Tolstoy, A Confession
Where there has been true science, art has always been its exponent.
— Leo Tolstoy, On the Significance of Science and Art
There lay between them, separating them, that same terrible line of the unknown and of fear, like the line separating the living from the dead.
— Leo Tolstoy, War and Peace
Let fear once get possession of the soul, and it does not readily yield its place to another sentiment.Sebastopol by Leo Tolstoy
— Leo Tolstoy, Sebastopol in December
If there was a reason why he preferred the liberal tendency to the conservative one (also held to by many of his circle), it was not because he found the liberal tendency more sensible, but it more closely suited his manner of life.
— Leo Tolstoy, Anna Karenina
Mento mori—remember death! These are important words. If we kept in mind that we will soon inevitably die, our lives would be completely different. If a person knows that he will die in a half hour, he certainly will not bother doing trivial, stupid, or, especially, bad things during this half hour. Perhaps you have half a century before you die—what makes this any different from a half hour?
— Leo Tolstoy
He felt that he could not turn aside from himself the hatred of men, because that hatred did not come from his being bad (in that case he could have tried to be better), but from his being shamefully and repulsively unhappy. He knew that for this, for the very fact that his heart was torn with grief, they would be merciless to him. He felt that men would crush him as dogs strangle a torn dog yelping with pain. He knew that his sole means of security against people was to hide his wounds from them
— Leo Tolstoy, Anna Karenina
If everyone fought for their own convictions there would be no war.
— Leo Tolstoy, War and Peace
A battle is won by the side that is absolutely determined to win. Why did we lose the battle of Austerlitz? Our casualties were about the same as those of the French, but we had told ourselves early in the day that the battle was lost, so it was lost.
— Leo Tolstoy, War and Peace
He remembered his mother’s love for him, and his family’s, and his friends’, and the enemy’s intention to kill him seemed impossible.
— Leo Tolstoy, War and Peace
Millions of men, renouncing their human feelings and reason, had to go from west to east to slay their fellows, just as some centuries previously hordes of men had come from the east to the west slaying their fellows.
— Leo Tolstoy, War and Peace
Rostov kept thinking about that brilliant feat of his, which, to his surprise, had gained him the St. George Cross and even given him the reputation of a brave man – and there was something in it that he was unable to understand. “So they’re even more afraid than we are!” he thought. “So that’s all there is to so-called heroism? And did I really do it for the fatherland? And what harm had he done, with his dimple and his light blue eyes? But how frightened he was! He thought I’d kill him. Why should I kill him? My hand faltered. And they gave me the St. George Cross. I understand nothing, nothing!
— Leo Tolstoy, War and Peace
It was necessary that millions of men in whose hands lay the real power — the soldiers who fired, or transported provisions and guns — should consent to carry out the will of these weak individuals…
— Leo Tolstoy, War and Peace
Davout looked up and gazed intently at him. For some seconds they looked at one another, and that look saved Pierre. Apart from conditions of war and law, that look established human relations between the two men. At that moment an immense number of things passed dimly through both their minds, and they realized that they were both children of humanity and were brothers.
— Leo Tolstoy, War and Peace
What a terrible thing war is, what a terrible thing!
— Leo Tolstoy, War and Peace
Life meanwhile, the actual life of men with their real interests of health and sickness, labour and rest, with their interests of thought, science, poetry, music, love, affection, hatred, passion, went its way, as always, independently, apart from the political amity or enmity of Napoleon Bonaparte, and apart from all possible reforms.
— Leo Tolstoy, War and Peace
Her maternal instinct told her Natasha had too much of something, and because of this she would not be happy
— Leo Tolstoy, War and Peace
And once he had seen this, he could never again see it otherwise, just as we cannot reconstruct an illusion once it has been explained.
— Leo Tolstoy
War is not a polite recreation but the vilest thing in life, and we ought to understand that and not play at war. Our attitude towards the fearful necessity of war ought to be stern. It boils down to this: we should have done with humbug, and let war be war and not a game. Otherwise, war is a favourite pastime of the idle and frivolous…
— Leo Tolstoy
To us, it is incomprehensible that millions of Christian men killed and tortured each other because Napoleon was ambitious or Alexander was firm, or because England’s policy was astute or the Duke of Oldenburg was wronged. We cannot grasp what connection such circumstances have the with the actual fact of slaughter and violence: why because the Duke was wronged, thousands of men from the other side of Europe killed and ruined the people of Smolensk and Moscow and were killed by them.
— Leo Tolstoy, War and Peace
Those are the men, ‘ added Bolkonsky with a sigh which he could not suppress, as they went out of the palace, ‘those are the men who decide the fate of nations.
— Leo Tolstoy, War and Peace
But to us of a later generation…it is inconceivable that millions of Christian men should have killed and tortured each other, because Napoleon was ambitious, Alexander firm, English policy crafty, and the Duke of Oldenburg hardly treated. We cannot grasp the connections between these circumstances and the bare fact of murder and violence, nor why the duke’s wrongs should induce thousands of men from the other side of Europe to pillage and murder the inhabitants of the Smolensk and Moscow provinces and to be slaughtered by them.
— Leo Tolstoy, War and Peace
But all these hints at foreseeing what actually did happen on the French as well as on the Russian side are only conspicuous now because the event has justified them. If the event had not come to pass, these hints would have been forgotten, as thousands and millions of suggestions and supposition are now forgotten that were current at the period, but have been shown by time to be unfounded and so have been consigned to oblivion.
— Leo Tolstoy, War and Peace
Can it be that there is not enough space for man in this beautiful world, under those immeasurable, starry heavens? Is it possible that man’s heart can harbour, amid such ravishing natural beauty, feelings of hatred, vengeance, or the desire to destroy his fellows? All the evil in man, one would think, should disappear on contact with Nature, the most spontaneous expression of beauty and goodness.
— Leo Tolstoy, The Raid
…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 support temperance, while they actually derive the larger part of their income from intemperance; just as they pretend to maintain liberty of the constitution, when it is the absence of liberty to which they owe their power; just as they pretend to care for the improvement of the laboring classes, while on oppression of the workman rest the very foundations of the State; just as they pretend to uphold Christianity, when Christianity is subversive of every government.
— Leo Tolstoy, The Kingdom of God Is Within You
To destroy the life that dwells in othersis beyond your power. The life of those you have slainhas vanished from your eyes, but is not destroyed. Youthought to lengthen your own life and to shorten theirs, but you cannot do this. Life knows neither time norspace. The life of a moment, and the life of a thousandyears: your life and the life of all the visible and invisiblebeings in the world, are equal. To destroy life, or to alterit, is impossible; for life is the one thing that exists. Allelse, but seems to us to be.
— Leo Tolstoy
You say: I am not free. But I have raised and lowered my arm. Everyone understands that this illogical answer is an irrefutable proof of freedom.
— Leo Tolstoy, War and Peace
Each man lives for himself, uses his freedom to achieve his personal goals, and feels with his whole being that right now he can or cannot do such-and-such an action; but as soon as he does it, this action, committed at a certain moment in time, becomes irreversible, and makes itself the property of history, in which is has not a free but a predestined significance.
— Leo Tolstoy, War and Peace
I’m not a goose, you’re the gooses for crying over nothing
— Leo Tolstoy, War and Peace
Natasha, in her lilac silk dress trimmed with black lace walked, as women can walk, with the more repose and stateliness the greater the pain and shame in her soul.
— Leo Tolstoy
Everyone thinks of changing the world, but no one thinks of changing himself.
— Leo Tolstoy
True life is lived when tiny changes occur.
— Leo Tolstoy
I know that most men—not only those considered clever, but even those who are very clever, and capable of understanding most difficult scientific, mathematical, or philosophic problems—can very seldom discern even the simplest and most obvious truth if it be such as to oblige them to admit the falsity of conclusions they have formed, perhaps with much difficulty—conclusions of which they are proud, which they have taught to others, and on which they have built their lives.
— Leo Tolstoy, What Is Art?
All the diversity, all the charm, and all the beauty of life are made up of light and shade.
— Leo Tolstoy, Anna Karenina
The old oak, utterly transformed, draped in a tent of sappy dark green, basked faintly, undulating in the rays of the evening sun. Of the knotted fingers, the gnarled excrecenses, the aged grief and mistrust- nothing was to be seen. Through the rough, century-old bark, where there were no twigs, leaves had burst out so sappy, so young, that is was hard to believe that the aged creature had borne them. “Yes, that is the same tree, ” thought Prince Andrey, and all at once there came upon him an irrational, spring feeling of joy and renewal. All the best moments of his life rose to his memory at once. Austerlitz, with that lofty sky, and the dead, reproachful face of his wife, and Pierre on the ferry, and the girl, thrilled by the beauty of the night, and that night and that moon- it all rushed at once into his mind.
— Leo Tolstoy, War and Peace
Her eyes, always sad, now looked into the mirror with particular hopelessness. “She’s flattering me, ” thought the princess, and she turned away and went on reading. Julie, however, was not flattering her friend: indeed, the princess’s eyes, large, deep, and luminous (sometimes it was as if rays of light came from them in sheaves), were so beautiful that very often, despite the unattractiveness of the whole face, those eyes were more attractive than beauty. But the princess had never seen the good expression of thise eyes, the expression they had in moments when she was not thinking of herself. As with all people, the moment she looked in the mirror, her face assumed a strained, unnatural, bad expression.
— Leo Tolstoy, War and Peace
But the princess had never seen the beautiful expression of her eyes; the expression that came into them when she was not thinking of herself. As is the case with everyone, her face assumed an affected, unnatural, ugly expression as soon as she looked in the looking glass.
— Leo Tolstoy, War and Peace
You think that your laws correct evil – they only increase it. There is but one way to end evil – by rendering good for evil to all men without distinction.
— Leo Tolstoy, Christians and the Law-Courts
As a house can be only be built satisfactorily and durably when there is a foundation, and a picture can be painted only when there is something prepared to paint it on, so carnal love is only legitimate, reasonable, and lasting when it is based on the respect and love of one human being for another.
— Leo Tolstoy, Walk in the Light & Twenty-Three Tales
The position occupied by Toporóff, involving as it did an incongruity of purpose, could only be held by a dull man devoid of moral sensibility. Toporóff possessed both these negative qualities. The incongruity of the position he occupied was this: It was his duty to keep up and to defend, by external measures, not excluding violence, that Church which, by its own declaration, was established by God Himself and could not be shaken by the gates of hell nor by anything human. This divine and immutable God-established institution had to be sustained and defended by a human institution–the Holy Synod, managed by Toporóff and his officials. Toporóff did not see this contradiction, nor did he wish to see it, and he was therefore much concerned lest some Romish priest, some pastor, or some sectarian should destroy that Church which the gates of hell could not conquer.
— Leo Tolstoy, Resurrection
Rummaging in our souls, we often dig up something that ought to have lain there unnoticed.
— Leo Tolstoy, Anna Karenina
Whatever we may say about the soul going to the sky… we know there is no sky but only an atmosphere.
— Leo Tolstoy
A writer is dear and necessary for us only in the measure of which he reveals to us the inner workings of his very soul.
— Leo Tolstoy
I felt how much better and more dignified it was for me to show off the finer side of my soul than of my body.
— Leo Tolstoy
The business of art lies just in this, — to make that understood and felt which, in the form of an argument, might be incomprehensible and inaccessible.
— Leo Tolstoy, What Is Art?
Art is not, as the metaphysicians say, the manifestation of some mysterious idea of beauty or God; it is not, as the aesthetical physiologists say, a game in which man lets off his excess of stored-up energy; it is not the expression of man’s emotions by external signs; it is not the production of pleasing objects; and, above all, it is not pleasure; but it is a means of union among men, joining them together in the same feelings, and indispensable for the life and progress toward well-being of individuals and of humanity.
— Leo Tolstoy, What Is Art?
To evoke in oneself a feeling one has once experienced, and having evoked it in oneself, then by means of movements, lines, colors, sounds, or forms expressed in words, so to transmit that feeling that others may experience the same feeling – this is the activity of art.
— Leo Tolstoy, What Is Art?
Though the children did not know Levin well and did not remember when they had last seen him, they did not feel towards him any of that strange shyness and antagonism so often felt by children towards grown-up people who ‘pretend, ‘ which causes them to suffer as painfully. Pretence about anything sometimes deceives the wisest and shrewdest man, but, however cunningly it is hidden, a child of the meanest capacity feels it and is repelled by it.
— Leo Tolstoy, Anna Karenina
What is the cause of historical events? Power. What is power? Power is the sum total of wills transferred to one person. On what condition are the willso fo the masses transferred to one person? On condition that the person express the will of the whole people. That is, power is power. That is, power is a word the meaning of which we do not understand.
— Leo Tolstoy, War and Peace
This history of culture will explain to us the motives, the conditions of life, and the thought of the writer or reformer.
— Leo Tolstoy, War and Peace
The subject of history is the life of peoples and mankind.
— Leo Tolstoy, War and Peace
In the legal respect, after the execution of the supposed incendiaries, the other half of Moscow burned down.
— Leo Tolstoy, War and Peace
Instead of the former divinely appointed aims of the Jewish, Greek, or Roman nations, which ancient historians regarded as representing the progress of humanity, modern history has postulated its own aims- the welfare of the French, German, or English people, or, in its highest abstraction, the welfare and civilization of humanity in general, by which is usually meant that of the peoples occupying a small northwesterly portion of a large continent.
— Leo Tolstoy
In order to understand, observe, deduce, man must first be conscious of himself as alive.
— Leo Tolstoy, War and Peace
A man’s every action is inevitably conditioned by what surrounds him and by his own body.
— Leo Tolstoy, War and Peace
Man lives consciously for himself, but serves as an unconscious instrument for the achievement of historical, universally human goals.
— Leo Tolstoy, War and Peace
There are such repulsive faces in the world.
— Leo Tolstoy, War and Peace
We are all brothers, and yet I live by receiving a salary for arraigning, judging and punishing a thief or a prostitute, whose existence is conditioned by the whole consumption of my life.
— Leo Tolstoy
The General belonged to the learned type of military men who believed that liberal and humane views can be reconciled with their profession. But being by nature a kind and intelligent man, he soon felt the impossibility of such a reconciliation.
— Leo Tolstoy, Resurrection
But every acquisition that is disproportionate to the labor spent on it is dishonest.
— Leo Tolstoy, Anna Karenina
One can no more approach people without love than one can approach bees without care. Such is the quality of bees…
— Leo Tolstoy
Just fancy! One can hear and see the grass growing, ‘ thought Levin, as he noticed wet slate-coloured aspen leaf move close to the point of a blade of grass.
— Leo Tolstoy, Anna Karenina
And as a sign that everything was now all right in the world, she opened her mouth a fraction, and after arranging her sticky lips better around her old teeth, smacked them and settled down into a state of blissful rest. Levin watched these last movements of hers closely. ‘I’m just the same!’ he said to himself; ‘Just the same! Never mind… All is well.
— Leo Tolstoy, Anna Karenina
Only one thing is necessary: we should all have a pure heart, with no anger, hatred, irritation, or hostility in it. If you feel hostility toward another person, think about their inner state. Do not think about yourself, or that you want to prove yourself right. In your quiet, inner thoughts, try to find the good in others. Do not say anything bad about others, even in your own thoughts. When you interact with a person, try to find as much common ground as possible, the more the better, and try to nurture this feeling. To cease being angry with a person and instead to seek peace, forgiveness and love toward him, remind yourself of any sins you may have in common and compare them.
— Leo Tolstoy
They meet, as we shall meet tomorrow, to murder one another; they kill and maim tens of thousands, and then have thanksgiving services for having killed so many people (they even exaggerate the number), and they announce a victory, supposing that the more people they have killed the greater their achievement. How does God above look at them and hear them?” exclaimed Prince Andrew in a shrill, piercing voice. “Ah, my friend, it has of late become hard for me to live. I see that I have begun to understand too much. And it doesn’t do for man to taste of the tree of knowledge of good and evil…. Ah, well, it’s not for long!” he added.
— Leo Tolstoy
Here’s my advice to you: don’t marry until you can tell yourself that you’ve done all you could, and until you’ve stopped loving the women you’ve chosen, until you see her clearly, otherwise you’ll be cruelly and irremediably mistaken. Marry when you’re old and good for nothing…Otherwise all that’s good and lofty in you will be lost.
— Leo Tolstoy, War and Peace
Many families remain for years in the same place, though both husband and wife are sick of it, simply because there is neither complete division nor agreement between them.
— Leo Tolstoy, Anna Karenina
He had never thought the question over clearly, but vaguely imagined that his wife had long suspected him of being unfaithful to her and was looking the other way. It even seemed to him that she, a worn-out, aged, no longer beautiful woman, not remarkable for anything, simple, merely a kind mother of a family, ought in all fairness to be indulgent. It turned out to be quite the opposite.
— Leo Tolstoy, Anna Karenina
Yes, there is something in me hateful, repulsive, ” thought Ljewin, as he came away from the Schtscherbazkijs’, and walked in the direction of his brother’s lodgings. “And I don’t get on with other people. Pride, they say. No, I have no pride. If I had any pride, I should not have put myself in such a position”.
— Leo Tolstoy, Anna Karenina
Music makes me forget myself, my true condition, it carries me off into another state of being, one that isn’t my own: under the influence of music I have the illusion of feeling things I don’t really feel, of understanding things I don’t understand, being able to do things I’m not able to do (…) Can it really be allowable for anyone who feels like it to hypnotize another person, or many other persons, and then do what he likes with them? Particularly if the hypnotist is the first unscrupulous individual who happens to come along?
— Leo Tolstoy, The Kreutzer Sonata
After dinner Natasha went to the clavichord, at Prince Andrey’s request, and began singing. Prince Andrey stood at the window, talking to the ladies, and listened to her. In the middle of a phrase, Prince Andrey ceased speaking, and felt suddenly a lump in his throat from tears, the possibility of which he had never dreamed of in himself. He looked at Natasha singing, and something new and blissful stirred in his soul. He was happy, and at the same time he was sad. He certainly had nothing to weep about, but he was ready to weep. For what? For his past love? For the little princess? For his lost illusions? For his hopes for the future? Yes, and no. The chief thing which made him ready to weep was a sudden, vivid sense of the fearful contrast between something infinitely great and illimitable existing in him, and something limited and material, which he himself was, and even she was. This contrast made his heart ache, and rejoiced him while she was singing.
— Leo Tolstoy, War and Peace
Natasha, with a vigorous turn from her heel on to her toe, walked over to the middle of the room and stood still… Natasha took the first note, her throat swelled, her bosom heaved, a serious expression came into her face. She was thinking of no one and of nothing at that moment, and from her smiling mouth poured forth notes, those notes that anyone can produce at the same intervals, and hold for the same length of time, yet a thousand times leave us cold, and the thousand and first time they set us thrilling and weeping.
— Leo Tolstoy, War and Peace
Music is the shorthand of emotion.
— Leo Tolstoy
What is music? What does it do to us? And why does it do to us what it does? People say that music has an uplifting effect on the soul: what rot! It isn’t true. It’s true that it has an effect, it has a terrible effect on me, at any rate, but it has nothing to do with any uplifting of the soul. Its effect on the soul is neither uplifting nor degrading — it merely irritates me.
— Leo Tolstoy, The Kreutzer Sonata
But these were essentially the accoutrements that appeal to all people who are not actually rich but who want to look rich, though all they manage to do is look like each other: damasks, ebony, plants, rugs and bronzes, anything dark and gleaming-everything that all people of a certain class affect so as to be like all other people of a certain class. And his arrangements looked so much like everyone else’s that they were unremarkable, though he saw them as something truly distinctive.
— Leo Tolstoy, The Death of Ivan Ilych
Doctoring her seemed to her as absurd as putting together the pieces of a broken vase. Her heart was broken. Why would they try to cure her with pills and powders?
— Leo Tolstoy, Anna Karenina
The true meaning of Christ’s teaching consists in the recognition of love as the supreme law of life, and therefore not admitting any exceptions.
— Leo Tolstoy
It was as if the main screw in his head, which held his whole life together, had become stripped. The screw would not go in, would not come out, but turned in the same groove without catching hold, and it was impossible to stop turning it.
— Leo Tolstoy, War and Peace
The higher a man stands on the social ladder, the greater the number of people he is connected with, the more power he has over other people, the more obvious is the predestination and inevitability of his every action.
— Leo Tolstoy, War and Peace
Power is the sum total of the wills of the mass, transfered by express or tactic agreement to rulers chosen by the masses.
— Leo Tolstoy, War and Peace
Power is a word the meaning of which we do not understand.
— Leo Tolstoy, War and Peace
In precisely the same way the specialty of government is not to obey, but to enforce obedience. And a government is only a government so long as it can make itself obeyed, and therefore it always strives for that and will never willingly abandon its power.
— Leo Tolstoy, The Kingdom of God Is Within You
One must be cunning and wicked in this world.
— Leo Tolstoy, War and Peace
Are we not all flung into the world for no other purpose than to hate each other, and so to torture ourselves and one another?
— Leo Tolstoy, Anna Karenina
I think that when you remember, remember, remember everything like that, you could go on until you remember what was there before you were in the world.
— Leo Tolstoy, War and Peace
I was wrong when I said that I did not regret the past. I do regret it; I weep for the past love which can never return. Who is to blame, I do not know. Love remains, but not the old love; its place remains, but it is all wasted away and has lost all strength and substance; recollections are still left, and gratitude; but…
— Leo Tolstoy, Family Happiness
Society in itself is no great harm, but unsatisfied social aspirations are a bad and ugly business. We must certainly accept, and we will.
— Leo Tolstoy, Family Happiness
Just imagine the existence of a man – let us call him A – who has left youth far behind, and of a woman whom we may call B, who is young and happy and has seen nothing as yet of life or of the world. Family circumstances of various kinds brought them together, and he grew to love her as a daughter, and had no fear that his love would change its nature. But he forgot that B was so young, that life was still a May-game to her and that it was easy to fall in love with her in a different way, and that this would amuse her. He made a mistake and was suddenly aware of another feeling, as heavy as remorse, making its way into his heart, and he was afraid. He was afraid that their old friendly relations would be destroyed, and he made up his mind to go away before that happened.
— Leo Tolstoy, Family Happiness
Pure and complete sorrow is as impossible as pure and complete joy.
— Leo Tolstoy, War and Peace
…but most of all he liked to listen to stories of real life. He smiled gleefully as he listened to such stories, putting in words and asking questions, all aiming at bringing out clearly the moral beauty of the action of which he was told. Attachments, friendships, love, as Pierre understood them, Karataev had none, but he loved and lived on affectionate terms with every creature with whom he was thrown in life, and especially so with man- not with any particular man, but with the men that happened to be before his eyes.But his life, as he looked at it, had no meaning as a separate life. It only had meaning as part of a whole, of which he was at all times conscious.
— Leo Tolstoy, War and Peace
Pierre had for the first time experienced that strange and fascinating feeling in the Slobodsky palace, when he suddenly felt that wealth and power and life, all that men build up and guard with such effort , is only worth anything through the joy with which it can all be cast away.
— Leo Tolstoy, War and Peace
To love life is to love God.
— Leo Tolstoy
Yet that grief and this joy were alike outside all the ordinary conditions of life; they were loop-holes, as it were, in that ordinary life through which there came glimpses of something sublime. And in the contemplation of this sublime something the soul was exalted to inconceivable heights of which it had before had no conception which reason lagged behind, unable to keep up with it.
— Leo Tolstoy, Anna Karenina
Remember that there is onlyone important time and is Now. The present moment isthe only time over which we have dominion. The mostimportant person is always the person with whom youare, who is right before you, for who knows if you willhave dealings with any other person in the future. Themost important pursuit is making that person, the onestanding at you side, happy, for that alone is the pursuitof life.
— Leo Tolstoy, Eleven Stories
…those children were already beginning to repay her care by affording her small joys. These joys were so trifling as to be as imperceptible as grains of gold among the sand, and in moments of depression she saw nothing but sand; yet there were brighter moments when she felt nothing but joy, saw nothing but the gold.
— Leo Tolstoy, Anna Karenina
Hypocrisy in anything whatever may deceive the cleverest and most penetrating man, but the least wide-awake of children recognizes it, and is revolted by it, however ingeniously it may be disguised.
— Leo Tolstoy, Anna Karenina
But there was another class of people, the real people. To this class they all belonged, and in it the great thing was to be elegant, generous, plucky, gay, to abandon oneself without a blush to every passion, and to laugh at everything else.
— Leo Tolstoy
It occurred to him that his scarcely perceptible attempts to struggle against what was considered good by the most highly placed people, those scarcely noticeable impulses which he had immediately suppressed, might have been the real thing, and all the rest false.
— Leo Tolstoy, The Death of Ivan Ilych
Imagine a problem in psychology: to find a way of getting people in our day and age – Christians, humanitarians, nice, kind people – to commit the most heinous crimes without feeling any guilt. There is only one solution – doing just what we do now: you make them governors, superintendents, officers or policemen, a process which, first of all, presupposes acceptance of something that goes by the name of government service and allows people to be treated like inanimate objects, precluding any humane or brotherly relationships, and, secondly, ensures that people working for this government service must be so interdependent that responsibility for any consequences of the way they treat people never devolves on any one of them individually.
— Leo Tolstoy, Resurrection
We are shocked by thieves taking pride in their clever touch, prostitutes in their depravity and murderers in their callousness. But it is shocking only because the atmosphere of the circles they move in is restricted, and – what matters most – we are on the outside. But isn’t the same thing happening when rich men take pride in their wealth (which is theft), military commanders in their victories (which are murder) and rulers in their power (which is violence)? We do not see them as people who corrupt the concept of life, or good and evil, in order to justify their own situation, but only because the circles of people who share these corrupt concepts are wider, and we belong to them.
— Leo Tolstoy
God gave the day, God gave the strength.
— Leo Tolstoy
Darkness had fallen upon everything for him; but just because of this darkness he felt that the one guiding clue in the darkness was his work, and he clutched it and clung to it with all his strength.
— Leo Tolstoy, Anna Karenina
The worker picked up Pakhom’s spade, dug a grave, and buried him – six feet from head to heel, exactly the amount of land a man needs.
— Leo Tolstoy, How Much Land Does a Man Need? and Other Stories
Whatever our destiny is or may be, we have made it ourselves, and we do not complain of it.
— Leo Tolstoy, Anna Karenina
You need feeling, emotion, to create. You can’t create out of indifference.
— Leo Tolstoy
I do not live when I loose belief in the existence of God. I should long ago have killed myself had I not had a dim hope of finding Him. I live really live only when I feel him and seek Him
— Leo Tolstoy, A Confession
I felt a wish never to leave that room – a wish that dawn might never come, that my present frame of mind might never change.
— Leo Tolstoy, Family Happiness
If a teacher has only love for the cause, it will be a good teacher. If a teacher has only love for student, as a father, mother, he will be better than the teacher, who read all the books, but has no love for the cause, nor to the students. If the teacher combines love to the cause and to his disciples, he is the perfect teacher.
— Leo Tolstoy
Maybe its because i rejoice over what i have and don’t grieve over what i don’t have”.
— Leo Tolstoy, Anna Karenina
-Why are you so sad? – Because you speak to me in words and I look at you with feelings.
— Leo Tolstoy
Spiritual activity, education, civilization, culture, the idea are all vague, indefinite concepts, under the banner of which it is quite convenient to use words that have a still less clear meaning and therefore can easily be plugged into any theory.
— Leo Tolstoy, War and Peace
Proshka was a man of self-esteem. He considered himself a cut above the rest, and had a degree of personal pride. His spell in prison was a humiliating experience for him. No longer could he strut with pride before his fellows, and his spirits sank at once.Proshka went home from prison embittered not so much against Pyotr Nikolayevich as against the whole world.Everyone said the same thing: after he came out of prison, Proshka went to pieces. He grew too lazy to work, took to drink, and was soon caught stealing clothes from the trademan’s wife. Once again he ended up in prison.
— Leo Tolstoy, The Forged Coupon
Spring, love, happiness! Are you not weary of that stupid, meaningless, constantly repeated fraud? Always the same and always a fraud! There is no spring, no sun, no happiness!
— Leo Tolstoy, War and Peace
It was only at her prayers that she felt able to think calmly and clearly either of Prince Andrey or Anatole, with a sense that her feelings for them were as nothing compared with her feel of worship and awe of God.
— Leo Tolstoy, War and Peace
Just as a painter needs light in order to put the finishing touches to his picture, so I need an inner light, which I feel I never have enough of in the autumn.
— Leo Tolstoy
Deliberately she shrouded the light in her eyes, but it shone against her will in the faintly perceptible smile.
— Leo Tolstoy, Anna Karenina
It became clear to him that all the dreadful evil he had been witnessing in prisons and jails and the quiet self-satisfaction of the perpetrators of this evil were the consequences of men trying to do what was impossible; trying to correct evil while being evil themselves…Now he saw clearly what all the terrors he had seen came from, and what ought to be done to put a stop to them. The answer he could not find was the same that Christ gave to Peter. It was that we should forgive always an infinite number of times because there are no men who have not sinned themselves, and therefore none can punish or correct others.
— Leo Tolstoy
In order to forgive, one must have lived through what I have lived through, and may God spare her that.
— Leo Tolstoy, Anna Karenina
The very nastiest and coarsest, I can’t tell you. It is not grief, not dullness, but much worse. It is as if all that was good in me had hidden itself, and only what is horrid remains.
— Leo Tolstoy, Anna Karenina
Just think! This whole world of ours is only a speck of mildew sprung up on a tiny planet, yet we think we can have something great – thoughts, actions! They are all but grains of sand
— Leo Tolstoy, Anna Karenina
Remember that there is only one important time and that is now. The present moment is the only time over which we have dominion. The most important person is always the person you are with, who is right before you, for who knows if you will have dealings with any other person in the future? The most important pursuit is making the person standing at your side happy, for that alone is the pursuit of life.
— Leo Tolstoy, The Emperor’s Three Questions
There are two sides to life for every individual: a personal life, in which his freedom exists in proportion to the abstract nature of his interests, and an elemental life within the swarm of humanity, in which a man inevitably follows laws laid down for him.
— Leo Tolstoy
Was it by reason that I attained to the knowledge that I must love my neighbor and not to throttle him?. They told me so when I was a child, and I gladly believed it, because they told me what was already in my soul. But who discovered it? Not reason! Reason has discovered the struggle for existence and the law that I must throttle all those who hinder the satisfaction of my desires. That is the deduction reason makes. But the law of loving others couldn’t be discovered by reason, because it is unreasonable.
— Leo Tolstoy, Anna Karenina
One’s writing is good only when the intelligence and the imagination are in equilibrium. As soon as one of them overbalances the other, it’s all up; you may as well throw it away and begin afresh.
— Leo Tolstoy
With friends, one is well; but at home, one is better.
— Leo Tolstoy, Anna Karenina
I often think that men don’t understand what is noble and what is ignorant, though they always talk about it.
— Leo Tolstoy, Anna Karenina
If so many men, so many minds, certainly so many hearts, so many kinds of love.
— Leo Tolstoy
Man survives earthquakes, epidemics, the horrors of disease, and agonies of the soul, but all the time his most tormenting tragedy has been, is, and will always be, the tragedy of the bedroom.
— Leo Tolstoy
Men never understand what honor is, though they’re always talking about it
— Leo Tolstoy, Anna Karenina
Men always did and always will err and nothing more than in what they consider right and wrong.
— Leo Tolstoy, War and Peace
Sitting in his old schoolroom on the sofa with little cushions on the arms and looking into Natasha’s wildly eager eyes, Rostov was carried back into that world of home and childhood which had no meaning for anyone else, but gave him some of the greatest pleasure in his life.
— Leo Tolstoy, War and Peace
I’ve never seen exquisite fallen beings, and I never shall see them, but such creatures as that painted Frenchwoman at the counter with the ringlets are vermin to my mind, and all fallen women are the same.’ ‘But the Magdalen?’ ‘Ah, drop that! Christ would never have said those words if He had known how they would be abused. Of all the Gospel those words are the only ones remembered.
— Leo Tolstoy, Anna Karenina
But she was not even grateful to him for it; nothing good on Pierre’s part seemed to her to be an effort, it seemed so natural for him to be kind to everyone that there was no merit in his kindness.
— Leo Tolstoy, War and Peace
Wealth and power and life, all that men build up and guard with such effort, is only worth anything through the joy with which it can all be cast away.
— Leo Tolstoy
It’s bad to be unable to stand solitude.
— Leo Tolstoy
Then he had looked on his spirit as his I; now, it was his healthy strong animal I that he looked upon as himself. And all this terrible change has come about because he had ceased to believe himself and had taken to believing others. This he had done because it was too difficult to live believing one’s self: believing one’s self, one had to decide every question, not in favour of one’s animal I, which was always seeking for easy gratification, but in almost every case against it. Believing others, there was nothing to decide; everything had been decided already, and always in favor of the animal I and against the spiritual. Nor was this all. Believing in his own self, he was always exposing himself to the censure of those around him; believing others, he had their approval.
— Leo Tolstoy, Resurrection
The terrible thing is that it’s impossible to tear the past out by the roots.
— Leo Tolstoy, Anna Karenina
How can one be well…when one suffers morally?
— Leo Tolstoy, War and Peace
They say: misfortunes, sufferings…well, if someone said to me right now, this minute: do you want to remain the way you were before captivity, or live through it all over again? For God’s sake, captivity again and horsemeat! 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. As long as there’s life, there’s happiness. There’s much, much still to come.
— Leo Tolstoy, War and Peace
Because of the self-confidence with which he had spoken, no one could tell whether what he said was very clever or very stupid.
— Leo Tolstoy, Война и мир
Formerly…when he tried to do anything for the good of everybody, for humanity…for the whole village, he had noticed that the thoughts of it were agreeable, but the activity itself was always unsatisfactory; there was no full assurance that the work was really necessary, and the activity itself, which at first seemed so great, ever lessened and lessened till it vanished. But now…when he began to confine himself more and more to living for himself, though he no longer felt any joy at the thought of his activity, he felt confident that his work was necessary, saw that it progressed far better than formerly, and that it was always growing more and more.
— Leo Tolstoy
What she did not know, and would never have believed, was that though her soul seemed to have been grown over with an impenetrable layer of mould, some delicate blades of grass, young and tender, were already pushing their way upwards, destined to take root and send out living shoots so effectively that her all-consuming grief would soon be lost and forgotten. The wound was healing from inside.
— Leo Tolstoy, War and Peace
Himmlisch ist’s wenn ich bezwungen Meine irdische Begier; Aber doch wenn’s nich gelungen Hatt’ ich auch recht huebsch Plaisir!Loosely translated:It is heavenly, when I overcomeMy earthly desiresBut nevertheless, when I’m not successful, It can also be quite pleasurable.
— Leo Tolstoy, Anna Karenina
He saw either death or the approach of it everywhere. But his undertaking now occupied him all the more. He had to live his life to the end, until death came. Darkness covered everything for him; but precisely because of this darkness he felt that his undertaking was the only guiding thread in this darkness, and he seized it and held on to it with all his remaining strength.
— Leo Tolstoy, Anna Karenina
He suffered from an unlucky faculty—common to many men, especially Russians—the faculty of seeing and believing in the possibility of good and truth, and at the same time seeing too clearly the evil and falsity of life to be capable of taking a serious part in it.
— Leo Tolstoy, War and Peace
Nice passion is reading
— Leo Tolstoy
Book is a nice companion
— Leo Tolstoy, War and Peace
I think the motive force of all our action is, after all, personal happiness.
— Leo Tolstoy, Anna Karenina
Is it really possible to tell someone else what one feels?
— Leo Tolstoy, Anna Karenina
Love them that hate you, but you can’t love those you hate.
— Leo Tolstoy, Anna Karenina
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. And to act so is immoral.
— Leo Tolstoy
These principles laid down as in variable rules: that one must pay a card sharper, but need not pay a tailor; that one must never tell a lie to a man, but one may to a woman; that one must never cheat any one, but one may a husband; that one must never pardon an insult, but one may give one and so on. These principles were possibly not reasonable and not good, but they were of unfailing certainty, and so long as he adhered to them, Vronsky felt that his heart was at peace and he could hold his head up.
— Leo Tolstoy, Anna Karenina
Well, do you suppose I made up my mind then that what I had seen was something sickening? Not a bit of it. ‘If it was done with such assurance and everyone thought it was necessary, then they must have known something I didn’t, ‘ was what I thought, and I tried to find out what it was. But I couldn’t, no matter how hard I exerted myself. And since I couldn’t, I couldn’t join the army as I’d planned to, and not only did I not join the army, I couldn’t find a place for myself anywhere in society, and ended up being no good for anything, as you can see.’Oh yes, we know all about how you’re no good for anything, ‘ said one of us, ‘But tell us: how many men would be no good for anything if it weren’t for the likes of you?
— Leo Tolstoy, After the Ball
When loving with human love one may pass from love to hatred, but divine love cannot change.
— Leo Tolstoy
When it is impossible to stretch the very elastic threads of historical ratiocination any farther, when actions are clearly contrary to all that humanity calls right or even just, the historians produce a saving conception of ‘greatness.’ ‘Greatness, ’ it seems, excludes the standards of right and wrong. For the ‘great’ man nothing is wrong, there is no atrocity for which a ‘great’ man can be blamed.
— Leo Tolstoy, War and Peace
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…
— Leo Tolstoy
Anything is better than lies and deceit!
— Leo Tolstoy, Anna Karenina
All that day she felt as if she were acting in a theatre with better actors than herself, and that her bad performance was spoiling the whole affair.
— Leo Tolstoy
Everything depends on upbringing.
— Leo Tolstoy, War and Peace
Questions about her feelings, about what has been or might be going on in her soul are non of my business; they are the business of her conscience and belong to religion.
— Leo Tolstoy
She had no need to ask why he had come. She knew as certainly as if he had told her that he was here to be where she was.
— Leo Tolstoy, Anna Karenina, Vol 1 of 8
It is pride that makes error and discord among men.
— Leo Tolstoy, The Coffee House of Surat
Ah, if everyone was as sensitive as you! There’s no girl who hasn’t gone through that. And it’s all so unimportant!
— Leo Tolstoy, Anna Karenina
Writing laws is easy, but governing is difficult.
— Leo Tolstoy, War and Peace
In my considered opinion, salary is payment for goods delivered and it must conform to the law of supply and demand. If, therefore, the fixed salary is a violation of this law – as, for instance, when I see two engineers leaving college together and both equally well trained and efficient, and one getting forty thousand while the other only earns two thousand , or when lawyers and hussars, possessing no special qualifications, are appointed directors of banks with huge salaries – I can only conclude that their salaries are not fixed according to the law of supply and demand but simply by personal influence. And this is an abuse important in itself and having a deleterious effect on government service.
— Leo Tolstoy, Anna Karenina
All the horrors of the reign of terror were based on concern for public tranquility.
— Leo Tolstoy
The prison inspector and the warders, though they had never understood or gone into the meaning of these dogmas and of all that went on in church, believed that they must believe, because the higher authorities and the Tsar himself believed in it. Besides, though faintly (and themselves unable to explain why), they felt that this faith defended their cruel occupations. If this faith did not exist it would have been more difficult, perhaps impossible, for them to use all their powers to torment people, as they were now doing, with a quiet conscience. The inspector was such a kind-hearted man that he could not have lived as he was now living unsupported by his faith.
— Leo Tolstoy, Resurrection
At one time, ‘ Golenishchev continued, either not observing or not willing to observe that both Anna and Vronsky wanted to speak, ‘at one time a freethinker was a man who had been brought up in the conception of religion, law, and morality, who reached freethought only after conflict and difficulty. But now a new type of born freethinkers has appeared, who grow up without so much as hearing that there used to be laws of morality, or religion, that authorities existed. They grow up in ideas of negation in everything — in other words, utter savages.
— Leo Tolstoy, Anna Karenina
And what is justice? The princess thought of that proud word ‘justice’. All the complex laws of man centered for her in one clear and simple law—the law of love and self-sacrifice taught us by Him who lovingly suffered for mankind though He Himself was God. What had she to do with justice or injustice of other people? She had to endure and love, and that she did.
— Leo Tolstoy, War and Peace
Woman, don’t you know, is such a subject that however much you study it, it’s always perfectly new.
— Leo Tolstoy
it’s much better to do good in a way that no one knows anything about it.
— Leo Tolstoy, Anna Karenina
The idea of seeking help in her difficulty in religion was as remote from her as seeking help from Alexey Alexandrovitch himself, although she had never had doubts of the faith in which she had been brought up. She knew that the support of religion was possible only upon condition of renouncing what made up for her the whole meaning of life. She was not simply miserable, she began to feel alarm at the new spiritual condition, never experienced before, in which she found herself. She felt as though everything were beginning to be double in her soul, just as objects sometimes appear double to over-tired eyes. She hardly knew that times what it was she feared, and what she hoped for. Whether she feared or desired what had happened, or what was going to happen and exactly what she longed for, she could not have said.
— Leo Tolstoy, Anna Karenina
It would be a sin to help you destroy yourself.
— Leo Tolstoy
And the candle by the light of which she had been reading that book filled with anxieties, deceptions, grief and evil, flared up brighter than ever, lit up for her all that had once been darkness, sputtered, grew dim and went out for ever.
— Leo Tolstoy, Anna Karenina
In the depths of his soul Ivan Ilyich knew that he was dying… he simply did not, he could not possibly understand it. The example of a syllogism he had studied in Kiesewetter’s logic – Caius is a man, men are mortal, therefore Caius is mortal– had seemed to him all his life to be correct only in relation to Caius, but by no means himself. For the man Caius, man in general, it was perfectly correct; but he was not Caius and not man in general, he had always been quite, quite separate from all other human beings…And Caius is indeed mortal, and it’s right that he die, but for me, Vanya, Ivan Ilyich, with all my feelings and thoughts– for me it’s another matter. And it cannot be that I should die. It would be too terrible.So it felt to him.
— Leo Tolstoy
Man lives consciously for himself but unconsciously he serves as an instrument for the accomplishment of historical and social ends.
— Leo Tolstoy, War and Peace
There are two sides to the life of every man: there is his individual existence which is free in proportion as his interests are abstract; and his elemental life as a unit in the human swarm, in which he must inevitably obey the laws laid down for him.
— Leo Tolstoy, War and Peace
Man is created for happiness, that happiness lies in himself, in the satisfaction of simple human needs; and that all unhappiness is due, not to privation but to superfluity.
— Leo Tolstoy, War and Peace
Will the freshness, lightheartedness, the need for love, and strength of faith which you have in childhood ever return? What better time than when the two best virtues — innocent joy and the boundless desire for love — were the only motives in life?
— Leo Tolstoy, Childhood, Boyhood, Youth
Respect is an invention of people who want to cover up the empty place where love should be.
— Leo Tolstoy, Anna Karenina
And not only the pride of intellect, but the stupidity of intellect. And, above all, the dishonesty, yes, the dishonesty of intellect. Yes, indeed, the dishonesty and trickery of intellect.
— Leo Tolstoy, Anna Karenina
Since the moment when, at the sight of his beloved and dying brother, Levin for the first time looked at the questions of life and death in the light of the new convictions, as he called them, which between the ages of twenty and thirty-four had imperceptibly replaced the beliefs of his childhood and youth, he had been less horrified by death than by life without the least knowledge of whence it came, what it is for, why, and what it is, Organisms, their destruction, the indestructibility of matter, the law of the conservation of energy, development—the terms that had superseded these beliefs—were very useful for mental purposes; but they gave no guidance for life, and Levin suddenly felt like a person who has exchanged a thick fur coat for a muslin garment and who, being out in the frost for the first time, becomes clearly convinced, not by arguments, but with the whole of his being, that he is as good as naked and that he must inevitably perish miserably.
— Leo Tolstoy, Anna Karenina
Vronsky meanwhile, in spite of the complete fulfilment of what he had so long desired, was not completely happy. He soon felt that the realization of his longing gave him only one grain of the mountain of bliss he had anticipated. That realization showed him the eternal error men make by imagining that happiness consists in the gratification of their wishes. When first he united his life with hers and donned civilian clothes, he felt the delight of freedom in general, such as he had not before known, and also the freedom of love—he was contented then, but not for long. Soon he felt rising in his soul a desire for desires—boredom. Involuntarily he began to snatch at every passing caprice, mistaking it for a desire and a purpose.
— Leo Tolstoy, Anna Karenina
He stepped down, trying not to look long at her, as if she were the sun, yet he saw her, like the sun, even without looking.
— Leo Tolstoy, Anna Karenina
Where did I get it from? Was it by reason that I attained to the knowledge that I must love my neighbour and not throttle him? They told me so when I was a child, and I gladly believed it, because they told me what was already in my soul. But who discovered it? Not reason! Reason has discovered the struggle for existence and the law that I must throttle all those who hinder the satisfaction of my desires. That is the deduction reason makes. But the law of loving others could not be discovered by reason, because it is unreasonable.
— Leo Tolstoy, Anna Karenina
I realized that even if all the people in the world from the day of creation found this to be necessary according to whatever theory, I knew that it was not necessary and that it was wrong. Therefore, my judgements must be based on what is right and necessary and not on what people say and do; I must judge not according to progress but according to my own heart.
— Leo Tolstoy, A Confession
what time can be more beautiful than the one in which the finest virtues, innocent cheerfulness and indefinable longing for love constitute the sole motives of your life?
— Leo Tolstoy, Childhood, Boyhood, Youth
I often think with regret of that fresh, beautiful feeling of boundless, disinterested love which came to an end without having ever found self-expression or return. It is strange how, when a child, I always longed to be like grown-up people, and yet how I have often longed, since childhood’s days, for those days to come back to me!
— Leo Tolstoy, Childhood
What better time is there in our lives than when the two best of virtues-innocent gaiety and a boundless yearning for affection-are our sole objects of pursuit?
— Leo Tolstoy, Childhood
Not having yet passed through those bitter experiences which enforce upon older years circumspection and coldness, I deprived myself of the pure delight of a fresh, childish instinct for the absurd purpose of trying to resemble grown-up people.
— Leo Tolstoy, Childhood
With all my soul I wished to be good, but I was young, passionate and alone, completely alone when I sought goodness. Every time I tried to express my most sincere desire, which was to be morally good, I met with contempt and ridicule, but as soon as I yielded to low passions I was praised and encouraged.
— Leo Tolstoy
He was in a fairy kingdom where everything was possible.He looked up at the sky. And the sky was a fairy realm like the earth. It was clearing, and over the tops of the trees clouds were swiftly sailing as if unveiling the stars.
— Leo Tolstoy
everything comes in time to him who knows how to wait . . . there is nothing stronger than these two: patience and time, they will do it all.
— Leo Tolstoy, War and Peace
Patience is waiting. Not passively waiting. That is laziness. But to keep going when the going is hard and slow – that is patience. The two most powerful warriors are patience and time.
— Leo Tolstoy
oh God! what am I to do if I love nothing but fame and men’s esteem?
— Leo Tolstoy
But perhaps it is always so, that men form their conceptions from fictitious, conventional types, and then—all the combinations made—they are tired of the fictitious figures and begin to invent more natural, true figures.
— Leo Tolstoy, Anna Karenina
I assure you that I sleep anywhere, and always like a dormouse.
— Leo Tolstoy, Anna Karenina
He felt what a murderer must feel, when he sees the body he has robbed of life. That body, robbed by him of life, was their love, the first stage of their love. There was something awful and revolting in the memory of what had been bought at this fearful price of shame. Shame at their spiritual nakedness crushed her and infected him.
— Leo Tolstoy, Anna Karenina
It hurt her to stir up these feelings, but yet she knew that that was the best part of her soul, and that that part of her soul would quickly be smothered in the life she was leading.
— Leo Tolstoy, Anna Karenina
Happiness is pleasure without regret
— Leo Tolstoy
She did not want to talk of her sorrow, but with that sorrow in her heart she could not talk of outside matters.
— Leo Tolstoy
If a man aspires to a righteous life, his first act of abstinence if from injury to animals.
— Leo Tolstoy
Perhaps you think I’m losing the thread of my thought? Not a bit of it! I’m still telling you the story of how I murdered my wife, They asked me in court how I killed her, what I used to do it with. Imbeciles! They thought I killed her that day, the fifth of October, with a knife. It wasn’t that day I killed her, it was much earlier. Exactly in the same way as they’re killing their wives now, all of them…
— Leo Tolstoy, The Kreutzer Sonata
I understood, not with my intellect but with my whole being, that no theories of the rationality of existence or of progress could justify such an act; I realized that even if all the people in the world from the day of creation found this to be necessary according to whatever theory, I knew that it was not necessary and that it was wrong. Therefore, my judgments must be based-on what is right and necessary and not on what people say and do; I must judge not according to progress but according to my own heart.
— Leo Tolstoy, A Confession
My belief assumed a form that it commonly assumes among the educated people of our time. This belief was expressed by the word “progress.” At the time it seemed to me that this word had meaning. Like any living individual, I was tormented by questions of how to live better. I still had not understood that in answering that one must live according to progress, I was talking just like a person being carried along in a boat by the waves and the wind; without really answering, such a person replies to the only important question-“Where are we to steer?”-by saying, “We are being carried somewhere.
— Leo Tolstoy, A Confession
During this journey it was as if he again thought over his whole life and reached the same old comforting and hopeless conclusion: that there was no need for him to start anything, that he had to live out his life without doing evil, without anxiety, and without wishing for anything.
— Leo Tolstoy, War and Peace
The memories of home and of her children rose up in her imagination with a peculiar charm quite new to her, with a sort of new brilliance. That world of her own seemed quite new to her now so sweet and precious that she would not on any account spend an extra day outside it, and she made up her mind that she would certainly go back next day.
— Leo Tolstoy, Anna Karenina
I … having filled my life with the spiritual blessings Christianity gave me, brimful of these blessings and living by them, I, like a child, not understanding them, destroy them — that is, I wish to destroy that by which I live.
— Leo Tolstoy, Anna Karenina
Men are like rivers: the water is the same in each, and alike in all; but every river is narrow here, is more rapid there, here slower, there broader, now clear, now cold, now dull, now warm. It is the same with men. Every man carries in himself the germs of every human quality, and sometimes one manifests itself, sometimes another, and the man often becomes unlike himself, while still remaining the same man.
— Leo Tolstoy
The main qualities that had earned him this universal respect in the service were, first, an extreme indulgence towards people, based on his awareness of his own shortcomings; second, a perfect liberalism, not the sort he read about in the newspapers, but the sort he had in his blood, which made him treat all people, whatever their rank or status, in a perfectly equal and identical way; and, third – most important – a perfect indifference to the business he was occupied with, owing to which he never got carried away and never made mistakes.
— Leo Tolstoy
How strange it was to think that he, who such a short time ago dared not believe in the happiness of her loving him, now felt unhappy because she loved him too much!
— Leo Tolstoy, Anna Karenina
While I doubted, I had hope; but now there is no hope left and all the same I doubt everything.
— Leo Tolstoy, Anna Karenina
Whether he was acting ill or well he did not know, and far from laying down the law about it, he now avoided talking or thinking about it. Thinking about it led him into doubts and prevented him from seeing what he should and should not do. But when he did not think, but just lived, he unceasingly felt in his soul the presence of an infallible judge deciding which of two actions was the better and which the worse; and as soon as he did what he should not have done he immediately felt this. In this way he lived, not knowing or seeing any possibility of knowing what he was or why he lived in the world.
— Leo Tolstoy, Anna Karenina
One may deal with things without love…but you cannot deal with men without it…It cannot be otherwise, because natural love is the fundamental law of human life.
— Leo Tolstoy, Resurrection
At the advent of danger there are always two voices that speak with equal force in the human heart: one very reasonably invites a man to consider the nature of the peril and the means of escaping it; the other, with a still greater show of reason, argues that it is too depressing and painful to think of the danger since it is not in man’s power to foresee everything and avert the general march of events, and it is better therefore to shut one’s eyes to the disagreeable until it actually comes, and to think instead of what is pleasant. When a man is alone he generally listens to the first voice; in the company of his fellow-men, to the second.
— Leo Tolstoy, War and Peace
If a man decides that it is better for him to resist the demands of a present feeble love, in the name of another, of a future manifestation, he deceives either himself or other people, and loves no one but himself. Future love does not exist. Love is a present activity only. The man who does not manifest love in the present has not love.
— Leo Tolstoy
Love does not exist. There exists the physical need for intercourse, and the rational need for a mate in life.
— Leo Tolstoy
All the variety, all the charm, all the beauty of life is made up of light and shadow.
— Leo Tolstoy, Anna Karenina
What am I coming for?” he repeated, looking straight into her eyes. “You know that I have come to be where you are, ” he said; “I can’t help it.
— Leo Tolstoy, Anna Karenina
Friends we shall never be, you know that yourself. Whether we shall be the happiest or the wretchedest of people–that’s in your hands.
— Leo Tolstoy, Anna Karenina
Never, never marry, my friend. Here’s my advice to you: don’t marry until you can tell yourself that you’ve done all you could, and until you’ve stopped loving the woman you’ve chosen, until you see her clearly, otherwise you’ll be cruelly and irremediably mistaken. Marry when you’re old and good for nothing…Otherwise all that’s good and lofty in you will be lost.
— Leo Tolstoy, War and Peace
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.
— Leo Tolstoy, War and Peace
If you look for perfection, you’ll never be content.
— Leo Tolstoy, Anna Karenina
if they hadn’t both been pretending, but had had what is called a heart-to-heart talk, that is, simply told each other just what they were thinking and feeling, then they would just have looked into each other’s eyes, and Constantine would only have said: ‘You’re dying, dying, dying!’ – while Nicholas would simply have replied: ‘I know I’m dying, but I’m afraid, afraid, afraid!’ That’s all they would have said if they’d been talking straight from the heart. But it was impossible to live that way, so Levin tried to do what he’d been trying to do all his life without being able to, what a great many people could do so well, as he observed, and without which life was impossible: he tried to say something different from what he thought, and he always felt it came out false, that his brother caught him out and was irritated by it.
— Leo Tolstoy
Love hinders death. 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.
— Leo Tolstoy, War and Peace
The antagonism between life and conscience may be removed in two ways: by a change of life or by a change of conscience.
— Leo Tolstoy
God knows of love
— Leo Tolstoy, Anna Karenina
With no doubt Al Hussain was one of the greatest rebels, for correcting the path of rulers who deviated from the right path. He, by his stance honorably acquired martyrdom martyrdom that free people wish to acquire.
— Leo Tolstoy
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.
— Leo Tolstoy, War and Peace
And those who only know the non-platonic love have no need to talk of tragedy. In such love there can be no sort of tragedy.
— Leo Tolstoy, Anna Karenina
That one must either explain life to oneself so that it does not seem to be an evil mockery by some sort of devil, or one must shoot oneself.
— Leo Tolstoy, Anna Karenina
the same question arose in every soul: “For what, for whom, must I kill and be killed?”… p982
— Leo Tolstoy, War and Peace
And indeed, if Eugene Iretnev was mentally deranged when he committed this crime, then everyone is similarly insane. The most mentally deranged people are certainly those who see in others indications of insanity they do not notice in themselves.
— Leo Tolstoy
The coffee was never served. It boiled over, spattered them all, and wet a costly tablecloth and the baroness’s dress. But it served the end that was desired for it gave rise to many jests and merry peals of laughter.
— Leo Tolstoy, Anna Karenina
I consider jealousy a humiliating and degrading feeling, and I shall never allow myself to be influenced by it.
— 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, Anna Karenina
Why nowadays there’s a new fashion every day.
— Leo Tolstoy, War and Peace
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, War and Peace
He never chooses an opinion, he just wears whatever happens to be in style.
— Leo Tolstoy, War and Peace
There will be today, there will be tomorrow, there will be always, and there was yesterday, and there was the day before…
— Leo Tolstoy, War and Peace
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, Anna Karenina
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, War and Peace
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, Anna Karenina
But that’s the whole aim of civilization: to make everything a source of enjoyment.
— Leo Tolstoy, Anna Karenina
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, War and Peace
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, Anna Karenina
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, Patriotism and Government
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 , 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
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, Anna Karenina
Just when the question of how to live had become clearer to him, a new insoluble problem presented itself – Death.
— Leo Tolstoy, Anna Karenina
Though the doctors treated him, let his blood, and gave him medications to drink, he nevertheless recovered.
— Leo Tolstoy, War and Peace
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, Anna Karenina
Perhaps it’s because I appreciate all I have so much that I don’t worry about what I haven’t got.
— Leo Tolstoy, Anna Karenina
…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, War and Peace
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, Anna Karenina
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, War and Peace
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, Resurrection
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, Anna Karenina
They were dealt with as in war, and they naturally employed the means that were used against them.
— Leo Tolstoy, Resurrection
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, Anna Karenina
Be bad, but at least don’t be a liar, a deceiver!
— Leo Tolstoy, Anna Karenina
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, The First Step: An Essay on the Morals of Diet, to Which Are Added Two Stories
Read the best books first, otherwise you’ll find you do not have time. – Henry David Thoreau
— Leo Tolstoy, A Calendar of Wisdom: Daily Thoughts to Nourish the Soul
What is reason given me for, if I am not to use it to avoid bringing unhappy beings into the world!
— Leo Tolstoy, Anna Karenina
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
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, War and Peace
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
Everyone had something disparaging to say about the unfortunate Maltyshcheva, and the conversation began crackling merrily like a kindling bonfire.
— Leo Tolstoy, Anna Karenina
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, Anna Karenina
There are no conditions to which a man cannot become accustomed.
— 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
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
Everybody thinks of changing humanity and nobody thinks of changing himself.
— Leo Tolstoy
The strongest of all warriors are these two-Time and Patience.
— Leo Tolstoy
Happiness does not depend on outward things but on the way we see them.
— 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
All happy families resemble one another every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way.
— 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
Never did Christ utter a single word attesting to a personal resurrection and a life beyond the grave.
— 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
There is no greatness where there is not simplicity.
— Leo Tolstoy
Regard the society of women as a necessary unpleasantness of social life and avoid it as much as possible.
— Leo Tolstoy
Work is the inevitable condition of human life the true source of human welfare.
— Leo Tolstoy
The two most powerful warriors are patience and time.
— Leo Tolstoy
War is so unjust and ugly that all who wage it must try to stifle the voice of conscience within themselves.
— Leo Tolstoy
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.
— Leo Tolstoy
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.
— Leo Tolstoy
One of the first conditions of happiness is that the link between Man and Nature shall not be broken.
— Leo Tolstoy
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.
— Leo Tolstoy
Even in the valley of the shadow of death, two and two do not make six.
— Leo Tolstoy
All violence consists in some people forcing others, under threat of suffering or death, to do what they do not want to do.
— Leo Tolstoy
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.
— Leo Tolstoy
All happy families resemble one another, each unhappy family is unhappy in its own way.
— Leo Tolstoy
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.
— Leo Tolstoy
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.
— Leo Tolstoy
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.
— Leo Tolstoy
There is no greatness where there is no simplicity, goodness and truth.
— Leo Tolstoy
Truth, like gold, is to be obtained not by its growth, but by washing away from it all that is not gold.
— Leo Tolstoy
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.
— Leo Tolstoy
Art is not a handicraft, it is the transmission of feeling the artist has experienced.
— Leo Tolstoy
Government is an association of men who do violence to the rest of us.
— Leo Tolstoy
The sole meaning of life is to serve humanity.
— Leo Tolstoy
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.
— Leo Tolstoy
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.
— Leo Tolstoy
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.
— Leo Tolstoy
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