Leo Tolstoy Quotes

I wanted to run after him, but remembered that it is ridiculous to run after one's wife's lover in one's socks; and I did not wish to be ridiculous but terrible.

If Mormonism is able to endure, unmodified, until it reaches the third and fourth generation, it is destined to become the greatest power the world has ever known.

Then he thought himself unhappy, but happiness was all in the future; now he felt that the best happiness was already in the past.

Only those live who do good.

There are people who, on meeting a successful rival, no matter in what, are at once disposed to turn their backs on everything good in him, and to see only what is bad. There are people, on the other hand, who desire above all to find in that lucky rival the qualities by which he has outstripped them, and seek with a throbbing ache at heart only what is good.

I'm getting old, that's the thing! What's in me now won't be there anymore.

He who has a mistaken idea of life, will always have a mistaken idea of death.

Wrong does not cease to be wrong because the majority share in it.

He had heard that women often love plain ordinary men, but he did not believe it, because he judged by himself and he could only love beautiful mysterious exceptional women.

Slavery, you know, is nothing else than the unwilling labor of many. Therefore to get rid of slavery it is necessary that people should not wish to profit by the forced labor of others and should consider it a sin and a shame. But they go and abolish the external form of slavery and arrange so that one can no longer buy and sell slaves, and they imagine and assure themselves that slavery no longer exists, and do not see or wish to see that it does, because people still want and consider it good and right to exploit the labor of others.

We must not only cease our present desire for the growth of the state, but we must desire its decrease, its weakening.

...so remember: great achievements take time, there is no overnight success.

All art has this characteristic-it unites people.

Happiness consists of living each day as if it were the first day of your honeymoon and the last day of your vacation.

He felt that all his hitherto dissipated and dispersed forces were gathered and directed with terrible energy towards one blissful goal.

When politics and home life have become one and the same thing, [...] then,[...] it is evident that we will be in a state of total liberty or anarchy.

… for nightinggales - we know - can’t live on fairytales.

I have found that a story leaves a deeper impression when it is impossible to tell which side the author is on.

One can often hear from the young people:" I do not want to live according to others` mind. I can think of it myself. " Why should one think of something, when it is already thought about. Take it and go farther, this is the strength of the mankind.

Error is the force that welds men together; truth is communicated to men only by deeds of truth.

In order to understand, observe, deduce, man must first be conscious of himself as alive.

He felt all the torment of his and her position, all the difficulties they were surrounded by in consequence of their station in life, which exposed them to the eyes of the whole world, obliged them to hide their love, to lie and deceive, and again to lie and deceive, to scheme and constantly think about others while the passion that bound them was so strong that they both forgot everything but their love.

God cannot be understood by logical reasoning but only by submission.

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.

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.

Governments not only are not necessary, but are harmful and most highly immoral institutions.

Much unhappiness has come from things left unsaid

I feel not only that I cannot disappear, as nothing disappears in the world, but that I will always be and have always been. I feel that, besides me, above me, spirits live, and that in this world there is truth.

There is no significant idea which cannot be explained to an intelligent twelve year old boy in fifteen minutes.

Read less, study less, but think more

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.

Mathematics is the queen of disciplines.... it will drive the nonsense out of your head!

He remembered his mother's love for him, and his family's, and his friends', and the enemy's intention to kill him seemed impossible.

The time is fast approaching when to call a man a patriot will be the deepest insult you can offer him. Patriotism now means advocating plunder in the interest of the privileged classes of the particular State system into which we have happened to be born.

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.

One can no more approach people without love than one can approach bees without care. Such is the quality of bees.

If you want to be happy, be happy.

Do not be sad about what you do not have. Instead, be happy about what you do have. If you will be sad about what you don't have, you will not be happy about what you do have.

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.

I think that when you remember, remember, remember everything like that, you could go on until you remember what was there before you were in the world.

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.

We are all created to be miserable, and that we all know it, and all invent means of deceiving each other. And when one sees the truth, what is one to do?

If you want to be happy, be.

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.

Joy can only be real if people look upon their life as a service and have a definite object in life outside themselves and their personal happiness.

The sobs and tears of joy he had not foreseen rose with such force within him that his whole body shook and for a long time prevented him from speaking. Falling on his knees by her bed. He held his wife's hand to his lips and kissed it, and her hand responded to his kisses with weak movement of finger. Meanwhile, at the foot of the bed, in the midwife's expert hands, like the flame of a lamp, flickered the life of a human being who had never existed before.

All happy families resemble one another, each unhappy family is unhappy in its own way.

but that what was for him the greatest and most cruel injustice appeared to others a quite ordinary occurrence.