Leo Tolstoy Quotes
The more is given the less the people will work for themselves, and the less they work the more their poverty will increase.
Leo Tolstoy (Help for the Starving, 1892)
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 (Quoted in Tolstoy's Letters: 1880-1910, 1978)
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 (On Civil Disobedience)
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.
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 (Tolstoy's Diary, January 6, 1853)
The only thing that we know is that we know nothing - and that is the highest flight of human wisdom.
Leo Tolstoy (War and Peace, 1869)
Don't seek God in temples. He is close to you. He is within you. Only you should surrender to Him and you will rise above happiness and unhappiness.
Leo Tolstoy (The Kingdom of God is Within You, 1894)
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, 1869)
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 (War and Peace, 1869)
It is amazing how complete is the delusion that beauty is goodness.
Leo Tolstoy (The Kreutzer Sonata)
Truth, like gold, is to be obtained not by its growth, but by washing away from it all that is not gold.
Leo Tolstoy (Quoted in Tolstoy's Diaries, 1985)
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
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, 1869)
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.
Leo Tolstoy (Writings on Civil Disobedience and Nonviolence, 1886)
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 (The Law of Violence and The Law of Love)
One thing only is needful: the knowledge of the simple and clear truth which finds place in every soul that is not stupefied by religious and scientific superstitions - the truth that for our life one law is valid - the law of love, which brings the highest happiness to every individual as well as to all mankind.
Leo Tolstoy (A Letter to a Hindu, 1908)
As soon as men live entirely in accord with the law of love natural to their hearts and now revealed to them, which excludes all resistance by violence, and therefore hold aloof from all participation in violence - as soon as this happens, not only will hundreds be unable to enslave millions, but not even millions will be able to enslave a single individual.
Leo Tolstoy (A Letter to a Hindu, 1908)
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, 1877)
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 (Quoted in On Life, and Essays on Religion, 1959)
It is only needful that we should not succumb to the erroneous, already defunct, public opinion of the past, which governments have induced artificially; it is only needful that each individual should say what he really feels or thinks, or at least that he should not say what he does not think.
Leo Tolstoy (Patriotism and Christianity, 1896)
The most difficult subjects can be explained to the most slow-witted man if he has not formed any idea of them already; but the simplest thing cannot be made clear to the most intelligent man if he is firmly persuaded that he knows already, without a shadow of doubt, what is laid before him.
Leo Tolstoy (The Kingdom of God is Within You, 1894)
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, 1869)
The idea of beauty is the fundamental idea of everything. In the world we see only distortions of the fundamental idea, but art, by imagination, may lift itself to the height of this idea. Art is therefore akin to creation.
Leo Tolstoy (What is Art?, 1897)
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 Kingdom of God is Within You, 1894)
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.
Leo Tolstoy (Family Happiness and Other Stories)
At the approach of danger there are always two voices that speak with equal force in the heart of man: one very reasonably tells the man to consider the nature of the danger and the means of avoiding it; the other even more reasonable says that it is too painful and harassing to think of the danger, since it is not a man's power to provide for everything and escape from the general march of events; and that it is therefore better to turn aside from the painful subject till it has come, and to think of what is pleasant. In solitude a man generally yields to the first voice; in society to the second.
Leo Tolstoy (War and Peace, 1869)
