Leo Tolstoy Quotes

To tell the truth is very difficult, and young people are rarely capable of it.

And that which yesterday was the novel opinion of one man, to-day becomes the general opinion of the majority.

There are always so many conjectures as to the issue of any event that, whatever the outcome, there will always be people to say: 'I said then that it would be so'

There are two methods of human activity - and according to which one of these two kinds of activity people mainly follow, are there two kinds of people: One use their reason to learn what is good and what is bad and they act according to this knowledge; the other act as they want to and then they use their reason to prove that that which they did was good and that which they didn't do was bad.

But the law of loving others could not be discovered by reason, because it is unreasonable.

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.

To love life is to love God. Harder and more blessed than all else is to love this life in one's sufferings, in undeserved sufferings.

Smiling with pleasure, they went through their memories, not sad, old people's memories, but poetic, youthful ones, those impressions from the very distant past where dream merges with reality, and they laughed softly, rejoicing at something.

Writing laws is easy, but governing is difficult.

Life is everything. Life is God. Everything shifts and moves, and this movement is God. And while there is life, there is delight in the self-awareness of the divinity. To love life is to love God. The hardest and most blissful thing is to love this life in one's suffering, in the guiltlessness of suffering.

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

Art should cause violence to be set aside and it is only art that can accomplish this.

Where is there any book of the law so clear to each man as that written in his heart?

History is the product of vast, amorphous and indecipherable social movements.

Conceit is incompatible with understanding.

The soul is immortal- well then, if I shall always live, I must have lived before, lived for a whole eternity.

Don’t you know that you are all my life to me? ...But peace I do not know, and can’t give to you. My whole being, my love...yes! I cannot think about you and about myself separately. You and I are one to me. And I do not see before us the possibility of peace either for me or for you. I see the possibility of despair, misfortune...or of happiness-what happiness!...Is it impossible?" Vronksy

And for him, who lived in a certain circle, and who required some mental activity such as usually develops with maturity, having views was as necessary as having a hat.

Each time of life has its own kind of love.

The truth is that the State is a conspiracy designed not only to exploit, but above all to corrupt its citizens... Henceforth, I shall never serve any government anywhere.

Some mathematician, I believe, has said that true pleasure lies not in the discovery of truth, but in the search for it.

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.

Beautiful as seemed mama's face, it became more lovely when she smiled and seemed to enliven everything about her.

India, which is the nursery of the great faiths of the world

A man can spend several hours sitting cross-legged in the same position if he knows that noting prevents him from changing it; but if he knows that he has to sit with his legs crossed like that, he will get cramps, his legs will twitch and strain towards where he would like to stretch them.

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.

A Christian cannot help being free, because in the pursuit and attainment of his object, no one can either hinder or retard him.

Though the doctors treated him, let his blood, and gave him medications to drink, he nevertheless recovered.

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.

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

How important the concept of God is, and how instead of valuing what has been given us, we with light hearts spurn it because of absurdities that have been attached to it.

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

In order to know what he is, a man must first know what the sum of this mysterious humanity is, a humanity made up of people who, like himself, do not understand what they are.

Can it be that there is not enough space for man in this beautiful world, under those immeasurable, starry heavens?

Hypocrisy in anything whatever may deceive the cleverest and most penetrating man, but the least wide-awake of children recognizes it, and is revolted by it, however ingeniously it may be disguised.

To say that you can love one person all your life is just like saying that one candle will continue burning as long as you live.

Music is the shorthand of emotion.

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.

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

But the older he grew and the more intimately he came to know his brother, the oftener the thought occurred to him that the power of working for the general welfare – a power of which he felt himself entirely destitute – was not a virtue but rather a lack of something: not a lack of kindly honesty and noble desires and tastes, but a lack of the power of living, of what is called heart – the aspiration which makes a man choose one out of all the innumerable paths of life that present themselves, and desire that alone.

Violence produces only something resembling justice, but it distances people from the possibility of living justly, without violence.

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

Religion reveals the meaning of life, and science only applies this meaning to the course of circumstances.

One of the most obtuse superstitions is the superstition of the scientists who say that man can exist without faith.

All men's instincts, all their impulses in life, are efforts to increase their freedom. Wealth and poverty, health and disease, culture and ignorance, labor and leisure, repletion and hunger, virtue and vice, are all terms for greater or less degree of freedom.

Respect was invented to cover the empty place where love should be.

Ivan Ilych saw that he was dying, and he was in continual despair. In the depth of his heart he knew he was dying, but not only was he not accustomed to the thought, he simply did not and could not grasp it. The syllogism he had learnt from Kiesewetter's Logic: "Caius is a man, men are mortal, therefore Caius is mortal," had always seemed to him correct as applied to Caius, but certainly not as applied to himself. That Caius - man in the abstract - was mortal, was perfectly correct, but he was not Caius, not an abstract man, but a creature quite, quite separate from all others.

Grow spiritually and help others to do so. It is the meaning of life.