Leo Tolstoy Quotes

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

For man to be able to live he must either not see the infinite, or have such an explanation of the meaning of life as will connect the finite with the infinite. ~ 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

Chance created the situation; genius made use of it. ~ Leo Tolstoy

All we can know is that we know nothing. And that's the height of human wisdom. ~ Leo Tolstoy

Anna Arkadyevna read and understood, but it was distasteful to her to read, that is, to follow the reflection of other people's lives. She had too great a desire to live herself. If she read that the heroine of the novel was nursing a sick man, she longed to move with noiseless steps about the room of a sick man; if she read of a member of Parliament making a speech, she longed to be delivering the speech; if she read of how Lady Mary had ridden after the hounds, and had provoked her sister-in-law, and had surprised everyone by her boldness, she too wished to be doing the same. But there was no chance of doing anything; and twisting the smooth paper knife in her little hands, she forced herself to read. ~ Leo Tolstoy

They wept because they were friends, and because they were kindhearted, and because they - friends from childhood - had to think about such a base thing as money, and because their youth was over. . . ~ Leo Tolstoy

I believe that order is better than chaos, creation better than destruction. I prefer gentleness to violence, forgiveness to vendetta. On the whole I think knowledge is preferable to ignorance, and I am sure human sympathy is more valuable than ideology. ~ Leo Tolstoy

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

Not only does a good army commander not need any special qualities, on the contrary he needs the absence of the highest and best human attributes - love, poetry, tenderness, and philosophic inquiring doubt. He should be limited, firmly convinced that what he is doing is very important (otherwise he will not have sufficient patience), and only then will he be a brave leader. God forbid that he should be humane, should love, or pity, or think of what is just and unjust. ~ Leo Tolstoy

All this mental illness of our occurred simply bc we lived immorally. We suffered from our immoral life, to smother our suffering we committed various abnormal acts.
I disliked him, bc I understood that he was a dirty adulterer. ~ Leo Tolstoy

There are moments when the future looks so black that one is afraid to let one's thoughts dwell on it, refuses to let one's mind function and tries to convince oneself that the future will not be, and the past has not been. At such moments, when the will is not governed or modified by reflection and the only incentives that remain in life are our physical instincts, I can understand how a child, being particularly prone owing to lack of experience to fall into such a state, may without the least hesitation or fear, with a smile of curiosity deliberately set fire to his own house - and then fan the flames where is brothers, his father an his mother, all of who he loves dearly, are sleeping. ~ Leo Tolstoy

I have to create a circle of reading for myself: Epictetus, Marcus Aurelius, Lao-Tzu, Buddha, Pascal, The New Testament. This is also necessary for all people. ~ Leo Tolstoy

Very often, all the activity of the human mind is directed not in revealing the truth, but in hiding the truth ~ Leo Tolstoy

[D]iscipline consists in this, that the men who undergo the instruction and have followed it for a certain time are completely deprived of everything which is precious to a man-of the chief human property, rational freedom-and become submissive, machine-like implements of murder in the hands of their organized hierarchic authorities. ~ Leo Tolstoy

For him all the girls in the world were divided into two classes: one class - all the girls in the world except her, and those girls with all sorts of human weaknesses, and very ordinary girls: the other class - she alone, having no weaknesses of any sort and higher than all humanity. ~ Leo Tolstoy

Liberty and equality," said the vicomte contemptuously, as if at last deciding seriously to prove to this youth how foolish his words were, "high-sounding words which have long been discredited. Who does not love liberty and equality? Even our Saviour preached liberty and equality. Have people since the Revolution become happier? On the contrary. We wanted liberty, but Buonaparte has destroyed it. ~ Leo Tolstoy

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

In our day the feeling of patriotism is an unnatural, irrational, and harmful feeling, and a cause of a great part of the ills from which mankind is suffering, and that, consequently, this feeling - should not be cultivated, as is now being done, but should, on the contrary, be suppressed and eradicated by all means available to rational men. ~ Leo Tolstoy

It's bad to be unable to stand solitude. ~ Leo Tolstoy

I find it difficult now to recall and understand the dreams which then filled my imagination. Even when I can recall them, I find it hard to believe that my dreams were just like that: they were so strange and so remote from life. ~ Leo Tolstoy

Through the influence of real art, aided by science, guided by religion ... peaceful co-operation of man is now obtained by external means - by law courts, police, charitable institutions, factory inspections ... It should be obtained by man's free and joyous activity. ~ Leo Tolstoy

God knows of love ~ Leo Tolstoy

Rivers are places that renew our spirit, connect us with our past, and link us directly with the flow and rhythm of the natural world. ~ Leo Tolstoy

And so the liberal tendency became a habit with Stepan Arkadyich, and he liked his newspaper, as he liked a cigar after dinner, for the slight haze it produced in his head. ~ Leo Tolstoy

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

... to stop loving and, at the same time, fall in love means to love twice as strong than before. ~ Leo Tolstoy

She was utterly unlike what she had been when he first saw her. Both morally and physically she had changed for the worse. [ ... ] He looked at her as a man looks at a faded flower he has gathered, with difficulty recognizing in it the beauty for which he picked and ruined it. ~ Leo Tolstoy

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

God gave the day, God gave the strength. ~ Leo Tolstoy

That's it, come on! ~ Leo Tolstoy

But any acquisition that doesn't correspond to the labour expended is dishonest ~ Leo Tolstoy

Conversation sprang up as to the elegance and realism of her acting -- the sort of conversation that is always repeated and is always the same. In the midst of the conversation Fedor Petrovich glanced at Ivan Ilych and became silent. The others also looked at him and grew silent. Ivan ~ Leo Tolstoy

Love is a priceless gift. This is the only thing we can give and yet - it is all you have left... ~ Leo Tolstoy

Now one often saw only her face and body, while her soul was not seen at all. ~ Leo Tolstoy

It was one of those things that one knows but cannot even tell oneself - so dreadful and shameful it would be to be mistaken. ~ Leo Tolstoy

There is nothing, nothing certain but the nothingness of all that is comprehensible to us, and the grandeur of something incomprehensible, but more important! ~ Leo Tolstoy

Am your faithful slave and to you alone I can confess that my children are the bane of my life. It is the cross I have to bear. That is how I explain it to myself. It can't be helped! He said no more, but expressed his ~ Leo Tolstoy

How sweet he is!" said Countess Marya, looking at the baby and playing with him. "This is what I don't understand, Nicolas," she turned to her husband. "How is it you don't understand the charm of these charming little miracles?" "I just don't, I can't," said Nikolai, looking at the baby with a cold gaze. "A piece of meat. ~ Leo Tolstoy

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

The march of humanity, springing as it does from an infinite multitude of individual wills, is continuous. ~ Leo Tolstoy

and Ivan Ilyich was left alone with the consciousness that his life was poisoned and was poisoning the lives of others, and that this poison did not weaken but penetrated more and more deeply into his whole being. With ~ Leo Tolstoy

But he immediately recalled his promise to Prince Andrew not to go there. Then, as happens to people of weak character, he desired so passionately once more to enjoy that dissipation he was so accustomed to that he decided to go. ~ Leo Tolstoy

That's my one desire, to be caught," answered Vronsky, with his serene,
good-humored smile. "If I complain of anything it's only that I'm not caught
enough, to tell the truth. I begin to lose hope. ~ Leo Tolstoy

In Russia, the person who put Sevastopol on the literary map was Leo Tolstoy, a veteran of the siege. His fictionalized memoir The Sebastopol Sketches made him a national celebrity. Already with the first installment of the work published, Tsar Alexander II saw the propaganda value of the piece and ordered it translated into French for dissemination abroad. That made the young author very happy. Compared with Tolstoy's later novels, The Sebastopol Sketches hasn't aged well, possibly because this is not a heartfelt book. As the twenty-six-year-old Tolstoy's Sevastopol diaries reveal, not heartache but ambition drove him at the time. Making a name as an author was just an alternative to two other grand plans - founding a new religion and creating a mathematical model for winning in cards (his losses during the siege were massive even for a rich person). ~ Constantine Pleshakov

The goal of the artist is not to solve a question irrefutably, but to force people to love life in all its countless, inexhaustible manifestations. If ~ Leo Tolstoy

I am very sorry you did not find me in yesterday. I was fussing about with Germans all day. We went with Weyrother to survey the dispositions. When Germans start being accurate there's no end to it! ~ Leo Tolstoy

When he was dressed, Stepan Arkadyevitch sprinkled some scent on himself, pulled down his shirt-cuffs, distributed into his pockets his cigarettes, pocketbook, matches, and watch with its double chain and seals, and shaking out his handkerchief, feeling himself clean, fragrant, healthy, and physically at ease, in spite of his unhappiness, he walked with a slight swing on each leg into the dining-room, where coffee was already waiting for him, and beside the coffee, letters and papers from the office. ~ Leo Tolstoy

Pierre's insanity consisted in not waiting, as he used to do, to discover personal attributes which he termed "good qualities" in people before loving them; his heart was now overflowing with love, and by loving people without cause he discovered indubitable causes for loving them. ~ Leo Tolstoy

Only those live who do good. ~ Leo Tolstoy

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

Happiness is in your ability to love others. ~ Leo Tolstoy

We expect rewards for goodness, and punishments for the bad things which we do. Often, they are not immediately ~ Leo Tolstoy

Were possible for a man to discover a mode of existence in which he could feel that, though idle, he was of use to the world and fulfilling his duty, ~ Leo Tolstoy

All the variety, all the charm, all the beauty of life is made up of light and shadow. ~ Leo Tolstoy

But if you are alive - live: tomorrow you'll die as I might have died an hour ago. And is it worth tormenting oneself, when one has only a moment of life in comparison with eternity? ~ Leo Tolstoy

His mother, a dried-up old lady with black eyes and ringlets, screwed up her eyes, scanning her son, and smiled slightly with her thin lips. Getting up from the seat and handing her maid a bag, she gave her little wrinkled hand to her son to kiss, and lifting his head from her hand, kissed him on the cheek. ~ Leo Tolstoy

...Nekhlúdoff clearly saw that all these people were arrested, locked up, exiled, not really because they transgressed against justice or behaved unlawfully, but only because they were an obstacle hindering the officials and the rich from enjoying the property they had taken away from the people. ~ Leo Tolstoy

It is better to know several basic rules of life than to study many unnecessary sciences. The major rules of life will stop you from evil and show you the good path in life; but the knowledge of many unnecessary sciences may lead you into the temptation of pride, and stop you from understanding the basic rules of life. ~ Leo Tolstoy

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. ~ Leo Tolstoy

He was not to blame for being born with an irrepressible charachter and a mind some how constrained. ~ Leo Tolstoy

Rostov went on ahead to fulfil the request, and to his great surprise learned that Dolokhov the brawler, Dolokhov the bully, lived in Moscow with an old mother and a hunchback sister, and was the most affectionate of sons and brothers. ~ Leo Tolstoy

To destroy governmental violence, only one thing is needed: It is that people should understand that the feeling of patriotism, which alone supports that instrument of violence, is a rude, harmful, disgraceful, and bad feeling, and, above all, is immoral. ~ Leo Tolstoy

The ideal is within you, and the obstacle to reaching this ideal is also within you. You already possess all the material from which to create your ideal self. - THOMAS CARLYLE ~ Leo Tolstoy

If once we begin judging and arguing about everything, nothing sacred will be left! ~ Leo Tolstoy

Never, never marry, my dear fellow! That's my advice: never marry till you can say to yourself that you have done all you are capable of, and until you have ceased to love the woman of your choice and have seen her plainly as she is, or else you will make a cruel and irrevocable mistake. Marry when you are old and good for nothing - or all that is good and noble in you will be lost. It will all be wasted on trifles. Yes! ~ Leo Tolstoy

At the point where he, today's Ivan Ilyich, began to emerge, all the pleasures that had seemed so real melted away now before his eyes and turned into something trivial and often disgusting.
And the further he was from childhood, the nearer he got to the present day, the more trivial and dubious his pleasures appeared. It started with law school. That had retained a little something that was really good: there was fun, there was friendship, there was hope. But in the last years the good times had become more exceptional. Then, at the beginning of his service with the governor, some good times came again: memories of making love to a woman. Then it became all confused, and the good times were not so many. After that there were fewer still; the further he went the fewer there were.
Marriage. . .an accident and such a disappointment, and his wife's bad breath, and all that sensuality and hypocrisy! And the deadlines of his working life, and those money worries, going on for a year, two years, ten, twenty - always the same old story. And the longer it went on the deadlier it became.
'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! ~ 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

Speak to her now? But that's just why I'm afraid to speak - because I'm happy now, happy in hope, anyway ... . And then? ... . But I must! I must! I must! Away with weakness! ~ Leo Tolstoy

The combination of causes of phenomena is beyond the grasp of the human intellect. But the impulse to seek causes is innate in the soul of man. And the human intellect, with no inkling of the immense variety and complexity of circumstances conditioning a phenomenon, any one of which may be separately conceived of as the cause of it, snatches at the first and most easily understood approximation, and says here is the cause. ~ Leo Tolstoy

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

The strangeness and absurdity of these replies arise from the fact that modern history, like a deaf man, answers questions no one asks. ~ Leo Tolstoy

Prayer is addressed to the personal God, not because he is personal indeed, I know for certain that he is not personal, because personality is limitation, while God is unlimited. ~ Leo Tolstoy

Why ask? Why doubt what you cannot help knowing? Why use words when words cannot express what one feels? ~ Leo Tolstoy

It is terrible when people do not know God, but it is worse when people identify as God what is not God. ~ 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

Occasionally she glanced at him, asking with her glance, 'Is this what I think?' "I understand,' she said, blushing. "What is this word?' he said, pointing to the "n' that signified the word "never." ... She wrote: t, I, c,g,n,o,a. ~ Leo Tolstoy

Before and after the funeral I never ceased to cry and be miserable, but it makes me ashamed when I think back on that sadness of mine, seeing that always in it was an element of self-love - now a desire to show that I prayed more than any one else, now concern about the impression I was producing on others, now an aimless curiosity which caused me to observe Mimi's cap or the faces of those around me. I despised myself for not experiencing sorrow to the exclusion of everything else, and I tried to conceal all other feelings: this made my grief insincere and unnatural. Moreover, I felt a kind of enjoyment in knowing that I was unhappy and I tried to stimulate my sense of unhappiness, and this interest in myself did more than anything else to stifle real sorrow in me. ~ Leo Tolstoy

War is like a game of chess ... but with this little difference, that in chess you may think over each move as long as you please and are not limited for time, and with this difference too, that a knight is always stronger than a pawn, and two pawns are always stronger than one, while in war a battalion is sometimes stronger than a division and sometimes weaker than a company. The relative strength of bodies of troops can never be known to anyone ... Success never depends, and never will depend, on position, or equipment, or even on numbers, and least of all on position. ~ Leo Tolstoy

To educate the peasantry, three things are needed: schools, schools and schools. ~ 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. And to act so is immoral. ~ Leo Tolstoy

What had become of his usually quiet and firm manner and the carelessly calm expression of his face? Every time he turned toward Anna he slightly bowed his head as if he wished to fall down before her, and in his eyes there was an expression of submission and fear. 'I do not wish to offend,' his every look seemed to say, 'I only wish to save myself, but I do not know how. ~ Leo Tolstoy

Levin felt so resolute and serene that no answer, he fancied, could affect him. ~ Leo Tolstoy

What could all that matter in comparison with the will of God, without Whose care not a hair of man's head can fall? ~ Leo Tolstoy

To a herd of rams, the ram the herdsman drives each evening into a special enclosure to feed and that becomes twice as fat as the others must seem to be a genius. And it must appear an astonishing conjunction of genius with a whole series of extraordinary chances that this ram, who instead of getting into the general fold every evening goes into a special enclosure where there are oats - that this very ram, swelling with fat, is killed for meat. But the rams need only cease to suppose that all that happens to them happens solely for the attainment of their sheepish aims; they need only admit that what happens to them may also have purposes beyond their ken, and they will at once perceive a unity and coherence in what happened to the ram that was fattened. Even if they do not know for what purpose they are fattened, they will at least know that all that happened to the ram did not happen accidentally, and will no longer need the conceptions of chance or genius. ~ Leo Tolstoy

And in all of us, as well as in the aspens and clouds and nebulae, there was a process of evolution. Evolution from what? Into what?- Eternal evolution and struggle... As though there could be any sort of tendency and struggle in the eternal! And I was astonished that in spite of the utmost effort of thought in this direction I could not discover the meaning of life, the meaning of my impulses and yearnings. And the meaning of my impulses is so clear within me, that I was living according to them all the time, and I was astonished and rejoiced when the peasant expressed it to me: to live for God, for my soul. ~ Leo Tolstoy

But really, why should you distress yourself? Whoever stirs up the past - out with his eye! Who is not a sinner before God and to blame before the Tsar, as the saying is? ~ Leo Tolstoy

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

What a terrible thing war is, what a terrible thing! ~ Leo Tolstoy

Faith - or not faith - I don't know what it is - but this feeling has come just as imperceptibly through suffering, and has taken firm root in my soul. ~ Leo Tolstoy

Rest, nature, books, music ... such is my idea of happiness. ~ Leo Tolstoy

The way to do away with war is for those who do not want war, who regard participation in it a sin, to refrain from fighting. ~ Leo Tolstoy

If you see that some aspect of your society is bad, and you want to improve it, there is only one way to do so: you have to improve people. And in order to improve people, you begin with only one thing: you can become better yourself ~ Leo Tolstoy

The whole of that day Anna spent at home, that's to say at the Oblonskys', and received no one, though some of her acquaintances had already heard of her arrival, and came to call; the same day. Anna spent the whole morning with Dolly and the children. She merely sent a brief note to her brother to tell him that he must not fail to dine at home. "Come, God is merciful," she wrote. ~ 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

They say: misfortunes and sufferings,' remarked Pierre, 'yes, but if right now, right this minute they asked me: "Would you rather be what you were before you were taken prisoner, or go through this all again?" For God's sake let me again have captivity and horse flesh! We imagine that when we are thrown out of our familiar rut all is lost, but that is only when something new and good can begin. While there is life there is happiness. There is much, much before us. I say this to you,' he added, turning to Natasha. ~ Leo Tolstoy

The vegetarian movement ought to fill with gladness the souls of those who have at heart the realization of God's kingdom upon earth, not because vegetarianism itself is such an important step towards the realization of this kingdom (all real steps are equally important or unimportant), but because it serves as a criterion by which we know that the pursuit of moral perfection on the part of man is genuine and sincere. ~ Leo Tolstoy

Let others be afraid, but the soul is not afraid of anything. It lives according to its own laws. It is bigger than space and older than time. It gives courage against all the misfortunes of life. - RALPH WALDO EMERSON ~ Leo Tolstoy

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

Better to know a few things which are good and necessary than many things which are useless and mediocre ~ Leo Tolstoy