Top 100 Leo Tolstoy Quotes
#1. Everyone had something disparaging to say about the unfortunate Maltyshcheva, and the conversation began crackling merrily like a kindling bonfire.
Leo Tolstoy
#2. Blessed are the peacemakers; theirs is the kingdom of heaven
Leo Tolstoy
#3. [T]he social relationship of young women to young men ... now seemed to Kitty like ignominious exposure of merchandise to be taken by the highest bidder.
Leo Tolstoy
#4. Then he thought himself unhappy, but happiness was all in the future; now he felt that the best happiness was already in the past.
Leo Tolstoy
#5. A man is never such an egotist as at moments of spiritual ecstasy. At such times it seems to him that there is nothing on earth more splendid and interesting than himself.
Leo Tolstoy
#6. Olenin always took his own path and had an unconscious objection to the beaten tracks.
Leo Tolstoy
#7. People are always happy where there is love, because their happiness in in themselves.
Leo Tolstoy
#8. No, bwother, I have gwown moustaches myself,
Leo Tolstoy
#9. Without knowing who I am and why I'm here it is impossible to live. Yet I cannot know that and therefore I cannot live
Leo Tolstoy
#10. The hero of my tale, whom I love with all the power of my soul, whom I have tried to portray in all his beauty, who has been, is, and will be beautiful, is Truth.
Leo Tolstoy
#11. Pure and complete sorrow is as impossible as pure and complete joy.
Leo Tolstoy
#12. Every general and every soldier was conscious of his own insignificance, aware of being but a drop in that ocean of men, and yet at the same time was conscious of his strength as a part of that enormous whole.
Leo Tolstoy
#13. He wanted and needed their love, but felt none towards them. He now had neither love nor humility nor purity
Leo Tolstoy
#14. In life, in true life, there can be nothing better than what is. Wanting something different than what is, is blasphemy.
Leo Tolstoy
#15. Yes, there is something uncanny, demonic and fascinating in her.
Leo Tolstoy
#16. 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.
Leo Tolstoy
#17. But perhaps it is always so, that men form their conceptions from fictitious, conventional types, and then - all the combinations made - they are tired of the fictitious figures and begin to invent more natural, true figures.
Leo Tolstoy
#18. They get a glimpse of red lips under a short veil, and exquisite little feet.
Leo Tolstoy
#19. The legislation of Quran will spread all over the world, because it agrees with the mind, logic and wisdom.
Leo Tolstoy
#20. This is where the strength of the physician lies, be he a quack, a homeopath or an allopath. He supplies the perennial demand for comfort, the craving for sympathy that every human sufferer feels.
Leo Tolstoy
#21. We are forced to fall back on fatalism as an explanation of irrational events (that is to say, events the reasonableness of which we do not understand).
Leo Tolstoy
#22. a huge pear in his hand for his wife, he had not found his wife in the drawing-room, to his surprise had not found her in the study either, and saw her
Leo Tolstoy
#23. An agile but unintelligent and abnormal German, possessed of the mania of grandeur.
Leo Tolstoy
#24. Questions about her feelings, about what has been or might be going on in her soul are non of my business; they are the business of her conscience and belong to religion.
Leo Tolstoy
#25. They were waiting for Marya Dmitrievna Akhrosimova, known in society as le terrible dragon, a lady celebrated not for her wealth or distinction, but for her straightforward speech and the frank simplicity of her manners.
Leo Tolstoy
#26. I don't want to prove anything; I merely want to live, to do no one harm but myself. I have the right to do that, haven't I?
Leo Tolstoy
#27. Ferreting in one's soul, one often ferrets out something that might have lain there unnoticed.
Leo Tolstoy
#28. 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.
Leo Tolstoy
#29. He liked fishing and seemed to take pride in being able to like such a stupid occupation.
Leo Tolstoy
#30. Satan can never be driven out by Satan. Error can never be corrected by error, and evil cannot be vanquished by evil.
Leo Tolstoy
#31. and the camp swarmed with well-provisioned sutlers and Austrian Jews offering all sorts of tempting wares. The
Leo Tolstoy
#32. Man must not check reason by tradition, but contrariwise, must check tradition by reason.
Leo Tolstoy
#33. Desire nothing for thyself, seek nothing, be not anxious or envious. Man's future and thy own fate must remain hidden from thee, but live so that thou mayest be ready for anything.
Leo Tolstoy
#34. A man's every action is inevitably conditioned by what surrounds him and by his own body.
Leo Tolstoy
#36. When you feel the desire for power, you should stay in solitude for some time
Leo Tolstoy
#37. Do not the figures make it clear that not the English, but the Indians, have enslaved themselves?' One
Leo Tolstoy
#38. All were glad, the plants, the birds, the insects, and the children. But men, grown-up men and women, did not leave off cheating and tormenting themselves and each other.
Leo Tolstoy
#39. Deliberately she shrouded the light in her eyes, but it shone against her will in the faintly perceptible smile.
Leo Tolstoy
#40. War is so unjust and ugly that all who wage it must try to stifle the voice of conscience within themselves.
Leo Tolstoy
#41. 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.
Leo Tolstoy
#42. 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.
Leo Tolstoy
#43. Why do i live? In the infinity of space, and infinity of time infinitely small particles mutate with infinite complexity. When you understand the laws of these mutations, you'll understand why you live.
Leo Tolstoy
#44. 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 ...
Leo Tolstoy
#45. She felt that the diving image of Mme Stahl that she had carried in her soul for a whole month had vanished irretrievably ... And by no effort of imagination could she bring back the former Mme Stahl.
Leo Tolstoy
#46. He talked to her as people commonly do talk in society - all sorts of nonsense, but nonsense to which he could not help attaching a special meaning in her case.
Leo Tolstoy
#47. Yes: if only a hundredth of the efforts spent in curing diseases were spent in curing debauchery, disease would long ago have ceased to exist, whereas now all efforts are employed, not in extirpating debauchery, but in favoring it, by assuring the harmlessness of the consequences.
Leo Tolstoy
#48. So he lived, not knowing and not seeing any chance of knowing what he was and for what purpose he had been placed in the word.
Leo Tolstoy
#49. He did what heroes do after their work is accomplished; he died.
Leo Tolstoy
#50. The true meaning of Christ's teaching consists in the recognition of love as the supreme law of life, and therefore not admitting any exceptions.
Leo Tolstoy
#51. [looked at other peoples lives and said,] 'How can one let it come to that? How can one not undo this ugly situation?' But now, when the disaster had fallen on his head, he not only did not think of how to undo the situation, but did not want to know about it at all.
Leo Tolstoy
#52. He was always in a hurry to get where he was not.
Leo Tolstoy
#53. False. Everything by which you have lived and live now is all a deception, a lie, concealing both life and death from you.
Leo Tolstoy
#54. One need only posit some threat to the public tranquility and any action can be justified.
All the horrors of the reign of terror were based on concern for public tranquility.
Leo Tolstoy
#55. Man is meant for happiness and this happiness is in him, in the satisfaction of the daily needs of his existence.
Leo Tolstoy
#56. Without knowing what I am and why I am here, life is impossible.
Leo Tolstoy
#57. If you do not know your place in the world and the meaning of your life, you should know there is something to blame; and it is not the social system, or your intellect, but the way in which you have directed your intellect.
Leo Tolstoy
#58. Men never understand what honor is, though they're always talking about it
Leo Tolstoy
#59. The possibility of killing one's self is a safety valve. Having it, man has no right to say life is unbearable.
Leo Tolstoy
#60. War on the other hand is such a terrible thing, that no man, especially a Christian man, has the right to assume the responsibility of starting it.
Leo Tolstoy
#61. Levin felt so resolute and serene that no answer, he fancied, could affect him.
Leo Tolstoy
#62. It is a rude feeling, because it is natural only to people standing on the lowest level of morality, and expecting from other nations such outrages as they themselves are ready to inflict.
Leo Tolstoy
#63. Man survives earthquakes, epidemics, the horrors of disease, and agonies of the soul, but all the time his most tormenting tragedy has been, is, and will always be, the tragedy of the bedroom.
Leo Tolstoy
#64. She still found no words in which she could express the complexity of her feelings; indeed, she could not even find thoughts in which she could clearly think out all that was in her soul.
Leo Tolstoy
#66. I love her not with my mind or my imagination, but with my whole being. Loving her I feel myself to be an integral part of all God's joyous world.
Leo Tolstoy
#67. Even in the valley of the shadow of death, two and two do not make six.
Leo Tolstoy
#68. Honest work is much better than a mansion.
Leo Tolstoy
#69. It boils down to this: we should have done with humbug, and let war be war, and not a game ... If there were none of this magnanimity business in warfare, we should never go to war, except for something worth facing certain death for.
Leo Tolstoy
#70. But does it make any difference now?" he thought. "And what will be there, and what has been done here? Why was I so sorry to part with life? There was something in this life I didn't and still don't understand...
Leo Tolstoy
#72. I developed a pathological pride and the insane conviction that it was my mission to teach people without knowing what I was teaching them.
Leo Tolstoy
#73. Pure, perfect sorrow is as impossible as pure and perfect joy.
Leo Tolstoy
#74. You owe forty-three thousand, Count,' said Dolokhov, and stretching himself he rose from the table. 'One does get tired sitting so long,' he added.
Leo Tolstoy
#75. 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.
Leo Tolstoy
#76. God is that infinite All of which man knows himself to be a finite part.
Leo Tolstoy
#77. Respect was invented to cover the empty place where love should be.
Leo Tolstoy
#79. I must drink lots of tea or I cannot work.
Tea unleashes the potential which slumbers in the depth of my soul.
Leo Tolstoy
#80. And just as the hungry stomach eagerly accepts every object it can get, hoping to find nourishment in it, Vronsky quite unconsciously clutched first at politics, then at new books, and then at pictures.
Leo Tolstoy
#81. The spirit of an army is the factor which multiplied by the mass gives the resulting force. To define and express the significance of this unknown factor - the spirit of an army - is a problem for science.
Leo Tolstoy
#82. Anything is better than lies and deceit!
Leo Tolstoy
#84. Art is a microscope which the artist fixes on the secrets of his soul, and shows to people these secrets which are common to all.
Leo Tolstoy
#85. Dear Lord, what a madhouse the world is!
Leo Tolstoy
#86. I threw it away feeling sorry to have vainly destroyed a flower that looked beautiful in its proper place. How many different plant lives man destroys to support his own existence.
Leo Tolstoy
#87. In the midst of winter, I find within me the invisible summer ...
Leo Tolstoy
#88. Pierre, who knew she was very stupid, sometimes attended, with a strange feeling of perplexity and fear, her evenings and dinner parties, where politics, poetry, and philosophy were discussed. At
Leo Tolstoy
#89. There is one evident, indubitable manifestation of the Divinity, and that is the laws of right which are made known to the world through Revelation.
Leo Tolstoy
#90. 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.
Leo Tolstoy
#91. And the most awful thing about it is that it's all my fault - all my fault, though I'm not to blame.
Leo Tolstoy
#92. 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.
Leo Tolstoy
#93. Prayer is an invisible tool which is wielded in a visible world.
Leo Tolstoy
#95. It was better not to remember such terrible details.
Leo Tolstoy
#96. The little princess, like an old war horse that hears the trumpet, unconsciously and quite forgetting her condition, prepared for the familiar gallop of coquetry, without any ulterior motive or any struggle, but with naive and lighthearted gaiety.
Leo Tolstoy
#97. I have discovered nothing new; I have only perceived what I already knew.
Leo Tolstoy
#98. But all profit that is out of proportion to the labor expended is dishonest.
Leo Tolstoy
#99. The truth is obtained like gold, not by letting it grow bigger, but by washing off from it everything that isn't gold
Leo Tolstoy
#100. However, the truth requires one to make an effort if one is to be freed from misconceptions and lies. You
Leo Tolstoy
Famous Authors
Popular Topics
Scroll to Top
