Leo Tolstoy Quotes

An agile but unintelligent and abnormal German, possessed of the mania of grandeur.

Woman, you see, is an object of such a kind that study it as much as you will, it is always quite new.

The simplest and shortest ethical precept is to be served as little as possible . . . and to serve others as much as possible.

What is important is not the length of life, but the depth of life. What is important is not to make life longer, but to take your soul out of time, as every sublime act does.

Each person's task in life is to become an increasingly better person.

The Kingdom of God is Within You.

I'm like a starving man who has been given food. Maybe he's cold, and his clothes are torn, and he's ashamed, but he's not unhappy.

All, everything that I understand, I understand only because I love.

For a few seconds they looked silently into each other's eyes, and the distant and impossible suddenly became near, possible, and inevitable.

The possibility of killing one's self is a safety valve. Having it, man has no right to say life is unbearable.

It will pass, it will all pass, we're going to be so happy! If our love could grow any stronger it would grow stronger because there is something horrifying in it.

I have learned what must be, and therefore have come to see the whole horror of what is.

And the light by which she had read the book filled with troubles, falsehoods, sorrow, and evil, flared up more brightly than ever before, lighted up for her all that had been in darkness, flickered, began to grow dim, and was quenched forever.

What is bad? What is good? What should one love, what hate? Why live, and what am I? What is lie,what is death? What power rules over everything?" he asked himself. And there was no answer to any of these questions except one, which was not logical and was not at all an answer to these questions. This answer was: "You will die--and everything will end. You will die and learn everything--or stop asking.

Every time I tried to express my most heartfelt desires to be morally good I met with contempt and ridicule; and as soon as I would give in to vile passions I was praised and encouraged. Ambition, love of power, self-interest, lechery, pride, anger, vengeance-all of it was highly esteemed.

When joy disappears, look for your mistake

Woman is more impressionable than man. Therefore in the Golden Age they were better than men. Now they are worse.

If you asked someone, 'Can you play the violin?' and he says, 'I don't know, I have not tried, perhaps I can,' you laugh at him. Whereas about writing, people always say: 'I don't know, I have not tried,' as though one had only to try and one would become a writer.

Teach French and unteach sincerity.

How interesting it would be to write the story of the experiences in this life of a man who killed himself in his previous life; how he stumbles against the very demands which had offered themselves before, until he arrives at the realization that he must fulfill those demands. The deeds of the preceding life give direction to the present life.

Perhaps it's because I appreciate all I have so much that I don't worry about what I haven't got.

He looked at her as a man looks at a faded flower he has gathered, with difficulty recognizing in it the beauty for which he picked and ruined it. And in spite of this he felt that then, when his love was stronger, he could, if he had greatly wished it, have torn that love out of his heart; but now when as at that moment it seemed to him he felt no love for her, he knew that what bound him to her could not be broken.

It's like scarlet fever: one has to get it over." "Then one should invent a way of inoculating love, like vaccination.

We're asleep until we love.

He who has love, is in God, and God is in him, for God is love.

People involve themselves in countless activities which they consider to be important, but they forget about one activity which is more important and necessary than any other, and which includes all other things: the improvement of their soul

The most important knowledge is that which guides the way you lead your life.

Her maternal instinct told her Natasha had too much of something, and because of this she would not be happy

There is nothing more harmful to you than improving only your material, animal side of life. There is nothing more beneficial, both for you and for others, than activity directed to the improvement of your soul.

There is no genius where there is not simplicity.

Patriotism in its simplest, clearest and most indubitable signification is nothing else but a means of obtaining for the rulers their ambitions and covetous desires, and for the ruled the abdication of human dignity, reason, conscience, and a slavish enthrallment to those in power.

All violence consists in some people forcing others, under threat of suffering or death, to do what they do not want to do.

From the self-confidence with which he spoke no one could tell whether what he said was very clever or very stupid.

We call beauty that which supplies us with a particular pleasure.

History, that is to say, the unconscious, universal life of humanity, in the aggregate, every moment profits by the life of kings for itself, as an instrument for the accomplishment of its own ends.

One may say with one's lips: “I believe that the world was created six thousand years ago;” or, “I believe that Jesus flew away into the skies and is sitting on the right hand of the Father;” or, “God is One, and also Three;” — but no one can believe it, because the words have no sense.

All the variety, all the charm, all the beauty of life is made up of light and shadow.

The most important of all sciences man can and must learn is the science of living so as to do the least evil and the greatest possible good.

Where there is a man who does not labor because another is compelled to work for him, there slavery is.

We shall all of us die, so why should I grudge a little trouble?

Suddenly I heard the words of Christ and understood them, and life and death ceased to seem to me evil, and instead of despair I experienced happiness and the joy of life undisturbed by death.

If we admit that human life can be ruled by reason, the possibility of life is destroyed.

He soon felt that the fulfillment of his desires gave him only one grain of the mountain of happiness he had expected. This fulfillment showed him the eternal error men make in imagining that their happiness depends on the realization of their desires.

What am I coming for?" he repeated, looking straight into her eyes. "You know that I have come to be where you are," he said; "I can't help it.

The higher a man stands on the social ladder, the greater the number of people he is connected with, the more power he has over other people, the more obvious is the predestination and inevitability of his every action.

We love people not so much for the good they've done us, as for the good we've done them.

To destroy governmental violence, only one thing is needed: It is that people should understand that the feeling of patriotism, which alone supports that instrument of violence, is a rude, harmful, disgraceful, and bad feeling, and, above all, is immoral.

I can’t think of you and myself apart. You and I are the same to me