Count Lev Nikolayevich Tolstoy (1828–1910), usually referred to in English as Leo Tolstoy, was a Russian writer who is regarded as one of the greatest authors of all time.
Here is a Collection of Leo Tolstoy Most Inspiring Quotes. Leo Tolstoy Quotes on Love, Humanity, Life and Society. Leo Tolstoy Love Quotes and Sayings. Short Leo Tolstoy Quotes. Leo Tolstoy Quotes Love is Life. Quotes and Sayings on Happiness, Nature, Art, War and Friendship by Leo Tolstoy.
Leo Tolstoy Quotes and Sayings
All happy families are alike; each unhappy family is unhappy in its own way.
Everyone thinks of changing the world, but no one thinks of changing himself.
Respect was invented to cover the empty place where love should be.
If you look for perfection, you'll never be content.
We can know only that we know nothing. And that is the highest degree of human wisdom.
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.
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.
It is amazing how complete is the delusion that beauty is goodness.
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.
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.
If you want to be happy, be.
Rummaging in our souls, we often dig up something that ought to have lain there unnoticed.
Spring is the time of plans and projects.
In the name of God, stop a moment, cease your work, look around you.
Is it really possible to tell someone else what one feels?
When you love someone, you love the person as they are, and not as you'd like them to be.
Nothing is so necessary for a young man as the company of intelligent women.
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.
Wrong does not cease to be wrong because the majority share in it.
If everyone fought for their own convictions there would be no war.
The two most powerful warriors are patience and time.
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.
Be bad, but at least don't be a liar, a deceiver!
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.
Love. The reason I dislike that word is that it means too much for me, far more than you can understand.
Anything is better than lies and deceit!
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.
All the variety, all the charm, all the beauty of life is made up of light and shadow.
Boredom: the desire for desires.
All great literature is one of two stories; a man goes on a journey or a stranger comes to town.
There is no greatness where there is not simplicity, goodness and truth.
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.
it's much better to do good in a way that no one knows anything about it.
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.
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.
If you love me as you say you do,' she whispered, 'make it so that I am at peace.
Sometimes she did not know what she feared, what she desired: whether she feared or desired what had been or what would be, and precisely what she desired, she did not know.
The best stories don't come from "good vs. bad" but "good vs. good.
All the girls in the world were divided into two classes: one class included all the girls in the world except her, and they had all the usual human feelings and were very ordinary girls; while the other class -herself alone- had no weaknesses and was superior to all humanity.
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.
But the law of loving others could not be discovered by reason, because it is unreasonable.
Happiness does not depend on outward things, but on the way we see them.
True life is lived when tiny changes occur.
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.
If we admit that human life can be ruled by reason, then all possibility of life is destroyed.
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.
It's hard to love a woman and do anything.
You can love a person dear to you with a human love, but an enemy can only be loved with divine love.
He soon felt that the fulfillment of his desires gave him only one grain of the mountain of happiness he had expected. This fulfillment showed him the eternal error men make in imagining that their happiness depends on the realization of their desires.
But I'm glad you'll see me as I am. Above all, I wouldn't want people to think that I want to prove anything. I don't want to prove anything, I just want to live; to cause no evil to anyone but myself. I have that right, haven't I?
We are asleep until we fall in Love!
I often think that men don't understand what is noble and what is ignorant, though they always talk about it.
What counts in making a happy marriage is not so much how compatible you are but how you deal with incompatibility.
I simply want to live; to cause no evil to anyone but myself.
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.
Everything I know, I know because of love.
He felt now that he was not simply close to her, but that he did not know where he ended and she began.
Love those you hate you.
Because of the self-confidence with which he had spoken, no one could tell whether what he said was very clever or very stupid.
Something magical has happened to me: like a dream when one feels frightened and creepy, and suddenly wakes up to the knowledge that no such terrors exist. I have wakened up.
All the diversity, all the charm, and all the beauty of life are made up of light and shade.
Not one word, not one gesture of yours shall I, could I, ever forget.
Whatever our fate is or may be, we have made it and do not complain of it.
He was afraid of defiling the love which filled his soul.
To get rid of an enemy one must love him.
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.
Every lie is a poison; there are no harmless lies. Only the truth is safe. Only the truth gives me consolation - it is the one unbreakable diamond.
I wanted movement and not a calm course of existence. I wanted excitement and danger and the chance to sacrifice myself for my love.
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.
Human science fragments everything in order to understand it, kills everything in order to examine it.
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.
Can it be that I have not lived as one ought?" suddenly came into his head. "But how not so, when I've done everything as it should be done?
What a strange illusion it is to suppose that beauty is goodness.
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.
How can one be well...when one suffers morally?
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.
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.
Everything intelligent is so boring.
Every heart has its own skeletons.
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.
There are no conditions to which a person cannot grow accustomed, especially if he sees that everyone around him lives in the same way.
It's all God's will: you can die in your sleep, and God can spare you in battle.
Happiness is an allegory, unhappiness a story.
I sit on a man's back choking him and making him carry me, and yet assure myself and others that I am sorry for him and wish to lighten his load by all means possible… except by getting off his back.
Music is the shorthand of emotion.
Everything depends on upbringing.
Which is worse? the wolf who cries before eating the lamb or the wolf who does not.
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?
Instead of going to Paris to attend lectures, go to the public library, and you won't come out for twenty years, if you really wish to learn.
Pure and complete sorrow is as impossible as pure and complete joy.
The only absolute knowledge attainable by man is that life is meaningless.
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.
Kings are the slaves of history.
To tell the truth is very difficult, and young people are rarely capable of it.
Life did not stop, and one had to live.
He could not be mistaken. There were no other eyes like those in the world. There was only one creature in the world who could concentrate for him all the brightness and meaning of life. It was she. It was Kitty.
As long as there are slaughter houses there will always be battlefields.
Here I am alive, and it's not my fault, so I have to try and get by as best I can without hurting anybody until death takes over.
One must be cunning and wicked in this world.
And you know, there's less charm in life when you think about death--but it's more peaceful.
In the midst of winter, I find within me the invisible summer.
My principal sin is doubt. I doubt everything, and am in doubt most of the time.
There can be no peace for us, only misery, and the greatest happiness.
I am always with myself, and it is I who am my tormentor.
Enough or not...it will have to do.
In the best, the friendliest and simplest relations flattery or praise is necessary, just as grease is necessary to keep wheels turning.
Historians are like deaf people who go on answering questions that no one has asked them.
All we can know is that we know nothing. And that's the height of human wisdom.
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.
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.
Writing laws is easy, but governing is difficult.
Anna spoke not only naturally and intelligently, but intelligently and casually, without attaching any value to her own thoughts, yet giving great value to the thoughts of the one she was talking to.
All that day she had had the feeling that she was playing in the theatre with actors better than herself and that her poor playing spoiled the whole thing.
There is something in the human spirit that will survive and prevail, there is a tiny and brilliant light burning in the heart of man that will not go out no matter how dark the world becomes.
There will be today, there will be tomorrow, there will be always, and there was yesterday, and there was the day before.
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.
To educate the peasantry, three things are needed: schools, schools and schools.
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.
"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."
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.
Ivan Ilych's life had been most simple and most ordinary and therefore most terrible.
We love people not so much for the good they've done us, as for the good we've done them.
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.
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.
The pleasure lies not in discovering truth, but in searching for it.
In infinite time, in infinite matter, in infinite space, is formed a bubble organism, and that bubble lasts a while and bursts, and that bubble is Me.
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.
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.
Every man and every living creature has a sacred right to the gladness of springtime.
The very fact of the death of someone close to them aroused in all who heard about it, as always, a feeling of delight that he had died and they hadn't.
Energy rests upon love; and come as it will, there's no forcing it.
He felt that he was himself and did not wish to be anyone else. He only wished now to be better than he had been formerly.
Am I mad, to see what others do not see, or are they mad who are responsible for all that I am seeing?
He did what heroes do after their work is accomplished; he died.
He liked fishing and seemed to take pride in being able to like such a stupid occupation.
One can live magnificently in this world if one knows how to work and how to love.
Life is too long to say anything definitely; always say perhaps.
For a few seconds they looked silently into each other's eyes, and the distant and impossible suddenly became near, possible, and inevitable.
A battle is won by him who is firmly resolved to win it.
I've always loved you, and when you love someone, you love the whole person, as they are, and not as you'd like them to be.
Teach French and unteach sincerity.
There was no answer, except the general answer life gives to all the most complex and insoluble questions. That answer is: one must live for the needs of the day, in other words, become oblivious.
Government is an association of men who do violence to the rest of us.
When one's head is gone one doesn't weep over one's hair!
Though the doctors treated him, let his blood, and gave him medications to drink, he nevertheless recovered.
I want movement, not a calm course of existence. I want excitement and danger and the chance to sacrifice myself for my love. I feel in myself a superabundance of energy which finds no outlet in our quiet life.
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.
One can no more approach people without love than one can approach bees without care. Such is the quality of bees.
I don't allow myself to doubt myself even for a moment.
The same question arose in every soul: "For what, for whom, must I kill and be killed?"
For if we allow that human life is always guided by reason, we destroy the premise that life is possible at all.
Why are you so sad? - Because you speak to me in words and I look at you with feelings.
I don't want to prove anything; I merely want to live, to do no one harm but myself. I have the right to do that, haven't I?
The sole meaning of life is to serve humanity.
If so many men, so many minds, certainly so many hearts, so many kinds of love.
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.
Everything ends in death, everything. Death is terrible.
Art is not a handicraft, it is the transmission of feeling the artist has experienced.
I can’t think of you and myself apart. You and I are the same to me.
Truth, like gold, is to be obtained not by its growth, but by washing away from it all that is not gold.
But that's the whole aim of civilization: to make everything a source of enjoyment.
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.
False. Everything by which you have lived and live now is all a deception, a lie, concealing both life and death from you.
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.
And where love ends, hate begins.
Seize the moments of happiness, love and be loved! That is the only reality in the world, all else is folly.
But every acquisition that is disproportionate to the labor spent on it is dishonest.
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.
The more we live by our intellect, the less we understand the meaning of life.
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.
The key to success in life is using the good thoughts of wise people.
Many people have ideas on how others should change; few people have ideas on how they should change.
It is not beauty that endears, it's love that makes us see beauty.
My piece of bread only belongs to me when I know that everyone else has a share, and that no one starves while I eat.
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