Leo Tolstoy Quotes

Childhood candor... shall I ever find you again?

Flesh eating is simply immoral, as it involves the performance of an act which is contrary to moral feeling: By killing, man suppresses in himself, unnecessarily, the highest spiritual capacity, that of sympathy and pity towards living creatures like himself and by violating his own feelings becomes cruel." "As long as there are slaughterhouses, there will be battlefields.

I must write each day without fail, not so much for the success of the work, as in order not to get out of my routine.

Before we can study the central issues of life today, we must destroy the prejudices and fallacies born of previous centuries.

The political is not compatible with the artistic, because the former, in order to prove, has to be one-sided.

Life consists in penetrating the unknown, and fashioning our actions in accord with the new knowledge thus acquired.

All governments are in equal measure good and evil. The best ideal is anarchy.

The highest wisdom has but one science-the science of the whole-the science explaining the whole creation and man's place in it.

The antagonism between life and conscience may be removed in two ways: by a change of life or by a change of conscience.

How often we sin, how much we deceive, and all for what?... All will end in death, all!

Even in the valley of the shadow of death, two and two do not make six.

Christian love comes from the understanding that there is a unity of divine origins in oneself and in other people, and not only in people, but in all living things.

The Jew - is the symbol of eternity. ... He is the one who for so long had guarded the prophetic message and transmitted it to all mankind. A people such as this can never disappear.

When we do not love, we sleep, we are children of the dust - but love, and you are a god, you are pure, as on the first day of creation.

A man is like a fraction whose numerator is what he is and whose denominator is what he thinks of himself. The larger the denominator, the smaller the fraction.

Never did Christ utter a single word attesting to a personal resurrection and a life beyond the grave.

If once we admit, be it for a single hour or in a single instance, that there can be anything more important than compassion for a fellow human being, then there is no crime against man that we cannot commit with an easy conscience.

Art begins when a man, with a purpose of communicating to other people a feeling he once experienced, calls it up again within himself and expresses it by certain external signs.

Man's mind cannot grasp the causes of events in their completeness, but the desire to find the causes is implanted in man's soul.

All great literature is one of two stories; a man goes on a journey or a stranger comes to town.

And once he had seen this, he could never again see it otherwise, just as we cannot reconstruct an illusion once it has been explained.

Man cannot possess anything as long as he fears death. But to him who does not fear it, everything belongs. If there was no suffering, man would not know his limits, would not know himself.

Between the murder of an animal and the murder of a man, there's no more than ONE step!

Morning or night, Friday or Sunday, made no difference, everything was the same: the gnawing, excruciating, incessant pain; that awareness of life irrevocably passing but not yet gone; that dreadful, loathsome death, the only reality, relentlessly closing in on him; and that same endless lie. What did days, weeks, or hours matter?

Humanity unceasingly strives forward from a lower, more partial and obscure understanding of life to one more general and more lucid.

In our day the feeling of patriotism is an unnatural, irrational, and harmful feeling, and a cause of a great part of the ills from which mankind is suffering, and that, consequently, this feeling - should not be cultivated, as is now being done, but should, on the contrary, be suppressed and eradicated by all means available to rational men.

Nothing is so necessary for a young man as the company of intelligent women.

The kinder and the more thoughtful a person is, the more kindness he can find in other people.

The more is given the less the people will work for themselves, and the less they work the more their poverty will increase.

Are we not all flung into the world for no other purpose than to hate each other, and so to torture ourselves and one another?

If there was a reason why he preferred the liberal tendency to the conservative one (also held to by many of his circle), it was not because he found the liberal tendency more sensible, but it more closely suited his manner of life.

God knows, but He's waiting

A Russian should rejoice if Poland, the Baltic Provinces, Finland, Armenia, should be separated, freed from Russia; so with an Englishman in regard to Ireland, India and other possessions; and each should help to do this, because the greater the state, the more wrong and cruel is its patriotism, and the greater is the sum of suffering upon which its power is founded. Therefore, if we really wish to be what we profess to be, we must not only cease our present desire for the growth of the state, but we must desire its decrease, its weakening, and help this forward with all our might.

A quiet secluded life in the country, with the possibility of being useful to people to whom it is easy to do good, and who are not accustomed to have it done to them; then work which one hopes may be of some use; then rest, nature, books, music, love for one's neighbor — such is my idea of happiness.

Some mathematician said that pleasure lies not in discovering the truth but in searching for it.

Man has received direct from God only one instrument wherewith to know himself and to know his relation to the universe--he has no other--and that instrument is reason.

God is that infinite All of which man knows himself to be a finite part.

Art is the uniting of the subjective with the objective, of nature with reason, of the unconscious with the conscious, and therefore art is the highest means of knowledge.

Men need only trust in Christ's teaching and obey it, and there will be peace on earth.

To know God and to live is the same thing. God is Life.

She was in that highly-wrought state when the reasoning powers act with great rapidity: the state a man is in before a battle or a struggle, in danger, and at the decisive moments of life - those moments when a man shows once and for all what he is worth, that his past was not lived in vain but was a preparation for these moments.

To evoke in oneself a feeling one has once experienced, and having evoked it in oneself, then by means of movements, lines, colors, sounds, or forms expressed through words, so to convey this so that others may experience the same feeling - this is the activity of art.

What I think about vivisection is that if people admit that they have the right to take or endanger the life of living beings for the benefit of many, there will be no limit to their cruelty.

If you no longer believe in the God in whom you believed in before, this comes from the fact that there was something wrong with your belief, and you must strive to understand better that which you call God.

Act as if you are, and you will become such.

Man recognizes that he will not die, only when he recognizes that he was never born, but always has been, is, and will be.

Seize the moments of happiness, love and be loved! That is the only reality in the world, all else is folly.

The sole meaning of life is to serve humanity.