Love is God, and to die means that I, a particle of love, shall return to the general and eternal source.
Leo TolstoyIt is a rude feeling, because it is natural only to people standing on the lowest level of morality, and expecting from other nations such outrages as they themselves are ready to inflict.
Leo TolstoyReligions are the exponents of the highest comprehension of life... within a given age in a given society... a basis for evaluating human sentiments. If feelings bring people nearer to the religion's ideal... they are good; if these estrange them from it, and oppose it, they are bad.
Leo TolstoyPeople try to do all sorts of clever and difficult things to improve life instead of doing the simplest, easiest thing-refusing to participate in activities that make life bad.
Leo TolstoyThe teaching of the church, theoretically astute, is a lie in practice and a compound of vulgar superstitions and sorcery.
Leo TolstoyMusic makes me forget my real situation. It transports me into a state which is not my own. Under the influence of music I really seem to feel what I do not feel, to understand what I do not understand, to have powers which I cannot have. Music seems to me to act like yawning or laughter; I have no desire to sleep, but I yawn when I see others yawn; with no reason to laugh, I laugh when I hear others laugh. And music transports me immediately into the condition of soul in which he who wrote the music found himself at that time. ~The Kreutzer Sonata
Leo Tolstoy