Top 827 Quotes & Sayings by Leo Tolstoy - Page 3

People involve themselves in countless activities which they consider to be important, but they forget about one activity which is more important and necessary than any other, and which includes all other things: the improvement of their soul

Flesh eating is simply immoral, as it involves the performance of an act which is contrary to moral feeling: By killing, man suppresses in himself, unnecessarily, the highest spiritual capacity, that of sympathy and pity towards living creatures like himself and by violating his own feelings becomes cruel." "As long as there are slaughterhouses, there will be battlefields.

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

The idea, shared by many, that life is a vale of tears, is just as false as the idea shared by the great majority, the idea to which youth and health and riches incline you, that life is a place of entertainment. Life is a place of service, and in that service one has to suffer a great deal that is hard to bear, but more often to experience a great deal of joy. But that joy can be real only if people look upon their life as a service, and have a definite object in life outside themselves and their personal happiness.

Wealth is a great sin in the eyes of God. Poverty is a great sin in the eyes of man.

Every heart has its own skeletons.

Effort is not a means to lead us to happiness. Effort itself is happiness

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

The only significance of life consists in helping to establish the kingdom of God.

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

I don't allow myself to doubt myself even for a moment.

...the more he did nothing, the less time he had to do anything.

Let us forgive each other - only then will we live in peace.

But Christ could certainly not have established the Church. That is, the institution we now call by that name, for nothing resembling our present conception of the Church-with its sacraments, its hierarchy, and especially its claim to infallibility-is to be found in Christ's words or in the conception of the men of his time.

I have found that a story leaves a deeper impression when it is impossible to tell which side the author is on.

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

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

Just imagine that the purpose of life is happinesss only- then life becomes a cruel and senseless thing.You have to embrace what the wisdom of humanity,your intellect and your heart tell you: that the meaning of life is to serve the force that sent you into the world.Then life becomes a joy

Happiness does not depend on outward things, but on the way we see them.

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

Life consists in penetrating the unknown, and fashioning our actions in accord with the new knowledge thus acquired.

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

People jump back and forth in pursuit of pleasures only because they see the emptiness of their lives more clearly than they do the emptiness of whichever new entertainment attracts them.

The Christian churches and Christianity have nothing in common save in name: they are utterly hostile opposites. The churches are arrogance, violence, usurpation, rigidity, death; Christianity is humility, penitence, submissiveness, progress, life.

Everything comes in time to him who knows how to wait. There is nothing stronger than those two: patience and time, they will do it all.

I can't understand how anyone can write without rewriting everything over and over again.

Science is meaningless because it gives no answer to our question, the only question important for us: 'What shall we do and how shall we live?'

Perhaps it's because I appreciate all I have so much that I don't worry about what I haven't got.

We're asleep until we love.

There are two Gods, there is the God that people generally believe in - a God who has to serve them. This God does not exist. But the God whom people forget - the God whom we all have to serve - exists, and is the prime cause of our existence and of all that we perceive.

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.

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

What is important is not the quantity of your knowledge but its quality. You can know many things without knowing the most important.

Slavery, you know, is nothing else than the unwilling labor of many. Therefore to get rid of slavery it is necessary that people should not wish to profit by the forced labor of others and should consider it a sin and a shame. But they go and abolish the external form of slavery and arrange so that one can no longer buy and sell slaves, and they imagine and assure themselves that slavery no longer exists, and do not see or wish to see that it does, because people still want and consider it good and right to exploit the labor of others.

Woman is more impressionable than man. Therefore in the Golden Age they were better than men. Now they are worse.

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

There can be only one permanent revolution- a moral one: the regeneration of the inner man.

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

He who has love, is in God, and God is in him, for God is love.

Happiness is pleasure without regret

Life could be limitless joy, if we would only take it for what it is, in the way it is given to us.

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

Governments not only are not necessary, but are harmful and most highly immoral institutions.

The only purpose of education is freedom; the only method is experience.

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.

When the suffering of another creature causes you to feel pain, do not submit to the initial desire to flee from the suffering one, but on the contrary, come closer, as close as you can to her who suffers, and try to help her.

The teaching of the church, theoretically astute, is a lie in practice and a compound of vulgar superstitions and sorcery.

All the true heroes of history will be forgotten and all the villains will be remembered as heroes.

it is hard for anyone who is dissatisfied not to blame some one else, and especially the person nearest of all to him, for the ground of his dissatisfaction.

And where love ends, hate begins

A battle is won by him who is firmly resolved to win it.

The goal of our life should not be to find joy in marriage, but to bring more love and truth into the world. We marry to assist each other in this task. The most selfish and hateful life of all is that of two beings who unite in order to enjoy life. The highest calling is that of the man who has dedicated his life to serving God and doing good, and who unites with a woman in order to further that purpose.

It is within my power either to serve God or not to serve Him. Serving Him, I add to my own good and the good of the whole world. Not serving Him, I forfeit my own good and deprive the world of that good, which was in my power to create.

How often we sin, how much we deceive, and all for what?... All will end in death, all!

The difference between real material poison and intellectual poison is that most material poison is disgusting to the taste, but intellectual poison, which takes the form of cheap newspapers or bad books, can unfortunately sometimes be attractive.

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

it's much better to do good in a way that no one knows anything about it.

The religious superstition is encouraged by means of the institution of churches, processions, monuments, festivities....The so-called clergy stupefy the masses....They befog the people and keep them in an eternal condition of stupefaction.

There is no genius where there is not simplicity.

The only absolute knowledge attainable by man is that life is meaningless.