Leo Tolstoy Quotes

God is the same everywhere.

Children: a torment and nothing more.

Drama, instead of telling us the whole of a man's life, must place him in such a situation, tie such a knot, that when it is untied, the whole man is visible.

Patriotism is the principle that will justify the training of wholesale murderers.

One must put oneself in every one's position. To understand everything is to forgive everything.

God forgive me everything!' she said, feeling the impossibility of struggling.

And Levin, a happy father and a man in perfect health, was several times so near suicide that he hid the cord, lest he be tempted to hang himself, and was afraid to go out with his gun, for fear of shooting himself. But Levin did not shoot himself, and did not hang himself; he went on living.

Those whom God wishes to destroy he drives mad.

Faith is the force of life.

Lay me down like a stone oh God, and raise me up like a new bread".

I am obliged to renounce violence, and abstain from it altogether.

...the more he did nothing, the less time he had to do anything.

Work is the inevitable condition of human life, the true source of human welfare.

I am always with myself, and it is I who am my tormentor.

She did not want to talk of her sorrow, but with that sorrow in her heart she could not talk of outside matters.

I can't understand how anyone can write without rewriting everything over and over again.

If so many men, so many minds, certainly so many hearts, so many kinds of love.

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.

Memento mori - remember death! These are important words. If we kept in mind that we will soon inevitably die, our lives would be completely different. If a person knows that he will die in a half hour, he certainly will not bother doing trivial, stupid, or, especially, bad things during this half hour. Perhaps you have half a century before you die-what makes this any different from a half hour?

It is not enough to be a hardworking person. Think: what do you work at?

It is by those who have suffered that the world has been advanced.

The teaching of the church, theoretically astute, is a lie in practice and a compound of vulgar superstitions and sorcery.

A holy spirit lives within you.

I'll get angry in the same way with the coachman Ivan, argue in the same way, speak my mind inappropriately, there will be the same wall between my soul's holy of holies and other people, even my wife, I'll accuse her in the same way of my own fear and then regret it, I'll fail in the same way to understand with my reason why I pray, and yet I will pray--but my life now, my whole life, regardless of all that may happen to me, every minute of it, is not only not meaningless, as it was before, but has the unquestionable meaning of the good which it is in my power to put into it!

We spend our lives trying to unlock the mystery of the universe, but there was a Turkish prisoner, Bahá’u’lláh, in Akka, Palestine who had the Key.

... a man has to think of his soul before everything else.

I don’t count life as life without love

The activity of art is... as important as the activity of language itself, and as universal.

As long as there are slaughterhouses there will be battlefields. A vegetarian diet is the acid test of humanitarianism.

All the stories and descriptions of that time without exception peak only of the patriotism, self-sacrifice, despair, grief, and heroism of the Russians. But in reality it was not like that...The majority of the people paid no attention to the general course of events but were influenced only by their immediate personal interests.

The true office of any faith is to give life a meaning which death cannot destroy.

The higher a man's conception of God, the better will he know Him. And the better he knows God, the nearer will he draw to Him.

Art is a human activity consisting in this, that one man consciously, by means of certain external signs, hands on to others feelings he has lived through, and that other people are infected by these feelings, and also experience them.

The question was a fashionable one, whether a definite line exists between psychological and physiological phenomena in human activity; and if so, where it lies?

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.

Pure and complete sorrow is as impossible as pure and complete joy.

Art is not a pleasure, a solace, or an amusement; art is a great matter. Art is an organ of human life, transmitting man's reasonable perception into feeling.

Everyone wants to change the world, but nobody wants to change himself.

In spite of death, he felt the need of life and love. He felt that love saved him from despair, and that this love, under the menace of despair, had become still stronger and purer. The one mystery of death, still unsolved, had scarcely passed before his eyes, when another mystery had arisen, as insoluble, urging him to love and to life.

Love is God, and to die means that I, a particle of love, shall return to the general and eternal source.

Nothing prevents our denying life by suicide. well then, kill yourself, and you won't discuss. If life displeases you, kill yourself! You live, and cannot understand the meaning of life - then finish it, and do not fool about in life, saying and writing that you do not understand it. You have come into good company where people are contented and know what they are doing; if you find it dull and repulsive - go away!

the same question arose in every soul: "For what, for whom, must I kill and be killed?"... p982

If we would only testify to the truth as we see it, it would turn out that there are hundreds, thousands, even millions of other people just as we are, who see the truth as we do...and are only waiting, again as we are, for someone to proclaim it. The Kingdom of God is within you.

One must do one of two tings: either admit that the existing order of society is just, and then stick up for one's rights in it;or acknowledge that you are enjoying unjust privileges, as i do, and then enjoy them and be satisfied.

These joys were so trifling as to be as imperceptible as grains of gold among the sand, and in moments of depression she saw nothing but the sand; yet there were brighter moments when she felt nothing but joy, saw nothing but the gold.

I believe that the reason of life is for each of us simply to grow in love.

excuse me' he added, taking the opera glasses out of her hands and looking over her bare shoulder at the row of boxes opposite, 'i'm afraid i'm becoming ridiculous

By patriotism is meant, not only spontaneous, instinctive love for one's own nation, and preference for it above all other nations, but also the belief that such love and preference are good and useful.