Top 827 Quotes & Sayings by Leo Tolstoy

Music is the shorthand of emotion.

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.

We lost because we told ourselves we lost.

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

The chief difference between words and deeds is that words are always intended for men for their approbation, but deeds can be done only for God.

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.

Boredom: the desire for desires.

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

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.

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

And all people live, Not by reason of any care they have for themselves, But by the love for them that is in other people.

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

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.

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

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

The sole meaning of life is to serve humanity.

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.

The two most powerful warriors are patience and time.

I sit on a man's back, choking him and making him carry me, and yet assure myself and others that I am very sorry for him and wish to ease his lot by all possible means - except by getting off his back.

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

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.

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

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.

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

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.

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

Nietzsche was stupid and abnormal.

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

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

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.

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.

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

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

True life is lived when tiny changes occur.

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.

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

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

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

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

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

If you want to be happy, be.

The law condemns and punishes only actions within certain definite and narrow limits; it thereby justifies, in a way, all similar actions that lie outside those limits.

If you want to be happy, try only to please God, not people.

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

History would be a wonderful thing – if it were only true.

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

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

Since corrupt people unite amongst themselves to constitute a force, then honest people must do the same.

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

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.

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.

Much unhappiness has come from things left unsaid

Memento 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?

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.

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

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

When ignorance does not know something, it says that what it does not know is stupid.

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

If you make it a habit not to blame others, you will feel the growth of the ability to love in your soul, and you will see the growth of goodness in your life.

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