Leo Tolstoy Quotes

Darkness had fallen upon everything for him; but just because of this darkness he felt that the one guiding clue in the darkness was his work, and he clutched it and clung to it with all his strength.

Love. The reason I dislike that word is that it means too much for me, far more than you can understand." - Anna Karenina {Anna Karenina}

Three things are needed to educate the peasantry: schools, schools, and schools.

Every man had his personal habits, passions, and impulses toward goodness, beauty, and truth.

Pretence about anything sometimes deceives the wisest and shrewdest man, but, however cunningly it is hidden, a child of the meanest capacity feels it and is repelled by it.

One of the first conditions of happiness is that the link between Man and Nature shall not be broken.

If every man could act as he chose, the whole of history would be a tissue of disconnected accidents.

Happiness is an allegory, unhappiness a story.

But every acquisition that is disproportionate to the labor spent on it is dishonest.

If you want to be happy, just be.

Prayer is an invisible tool which is wielded in a visible world.

I imagine, joking apart, that to know love, one must make mistakes and then correct them.

Be bad, but at least don't be a liar, a deceiver!

Spring is the time of plans and projects.

The law of violence is not a law, but a simple fact which can only be a law when it does not meet with protest and opposition. It is like the cold, darkness and weight, which people had to put up with until recently when warmth, illumination and leverage were discovered.

Seize the moment of happiness... love and be loved.

There's a way out of every situation.

It is within my power either to serve God or not to serve Him. Serving Him, I add to my own good and the good of the whole world. Not serving Him, I forfeit my own good and deprive the world of that good, which was in my power to create.

I often think that men don't understand what is noble and what is ignorant, though they always talk about it.

The best generals I have known were... stupid or absent-minded men. Not only does a good army commander not need any special qualities, on the contrary he needs the absence of the highest and best human attributes - love, poetry, tenderness, and philosophic inquiring doubt. He should be limited, firmly convinced that what he is doing is very important (otherwise he will not have sufficient patience), and only then will he be a brave leader. God forbid that he should be humane, should love, or pity, or think of what is just and unjust.

Real art, like the wife of an affectionate husband, needs no ornaments. But counterfeit art, like a prostitute, must always be decked out. The cause of production of real art is the artist's inner need to express a feeling that has accumulated...The cause of counterfeit art, as of prostitution, is gain. The consequence of true art is the introduction of a new feeling into the intercourse of life... The consequences of counterfeit art are the perversion of man, pleasure which never satisfies, and the weakening of man's spiritual strength.

So long as people do not consider all men as their brothers and do not consider human life as the most sacred thing, which rather than destroy they must consider it their first and foremost duty to support; that is so long as people do not behave towards one another in a religious manner, they will always ruin one another's lives for the sake of personal gain.

There is only one way to put an end to evil, and that is to do good for evil.

Nowhere nor in anything, except in the assertion of the Church, can we find that God or Christ founded anything like what churchmen understand by the Church.

In difficult circumstances always act on first impressions.

From the child of five to myself is but a step. But from the newborn baby to the child of five is an appalling distance.

It's all God's will: you can die in your sleep, and God can spare you in battle.

Music is love in search of a voice.

I prefer a good pair of boots to Shakespeare.

The ideas of the wise have been tested by centuries. Everything medium is lost and only original, deep and useful things are left.

When it is impossible to stretch the very elastic threads of historical ratiocination any farther, when actions are clearly contrary to all that humanity calls right or even just, the historians produce a saving conception of 'greatness.' 'Greatness,' it seems, excludes the standards of right and wrong. For the 'great' man nothing is wrong, there is no atrocity for which a 'great' man can be blamed.

Music makes me forget myself, my true condition, it carries me off into another state of being, one that isn't my own.

There are no conditions to which a man cannot get accustomed, especially if he sees that everyone around him lives in the same way.

Boredom is desire seeking desire.

At one time,' Golenishchev continued, either not observing or not willing to observe that both Anna and Vronsky wanted to speak, 'at one time a freethinker was a man who had been brought up in the conception of religion, law, and morality, who reached freethought only after conflict and difficulty. But now a new type of born freethinkers has appeared, who grow up without so much as hearing that there used to be laws of morality, or religion, that authorities existed. They grow up in ideas of negation in everything - in other words, utter savages.

Truth, like gold, is to be obtained not by its growth, but by washing away from it all that is not gold.

Great works of art are only great because they are accessible and comprehensible to everyone.

Every heart has its own skeletons.

Men are so accustomed to maintaining external order by violence that they cannot conceive of life being possible without violence.

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.

And you know, there's less charm in life when you think about death--but it's more peaceful.

No matter when, at whatever moment, if she were asked what she was thinking about she could reply quite correctly - one thing, her happiness and her unhappiness.

God gave the day, God gave the strength.

I did not myself know what I wanted: I feared life, desired to escape from it, yet still hoped something of it.

Religions 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.

The religious superstition is encouraged by means of the institution of churches, processions, monuments, festivities....The so-called clergy stupefy the masses....They befog the people and keep them in an eternal condition of stupefaction.

Art can compel people freely, gladly, and spontaneously to sacrifice themselves in the service of man.

Understand then all of you, especially the young, that to want to impose an imaginary state of government on others by violence is not only a vulgar superstition, but even a criminal work. Understand that this work, far from assuring the well-being of humanity is only a lie, a more or less unconscious hypocrisy, camouflaging the lowest passions we posses.