Leo Tolstoy Quotes That Will Inspire You To Lead A Better Life

Leo Tolstoy Quotes About Changing The World

Enjoy the best of Leo Tolstoy quotes. Inspiring Quotes by Leo Tolstoy, Russian Novelist.

Freethinkers are those who are willing to use their minds without prejudice and without fearing to understand things that clash with their own customs, privileges, or beliefs. This state of mind is not common, but it is essential for right thinking.

If, then, I were asked for the most important advice I could give, that which I considered to be the most useful to the men of our century, I should simply say: in the name of God, stop a moment, cease your work, look around you.

The two most powerful warriors are patience and time.

All happy families are alike; each unhappy family is unhappy in its own way.
Leo Tolstoy Quote from Anna Karenina

If you want to be happy, be.

Every heart has its own skeletons.

The sole meaning of life is to serve humanity.

Happiness does not depend on outward things, but on the way we see them.

Historians are like deaf people who go on answering questions that no one has asked them.

If you look for perfection, you’ll never be content.
Leo Tolstoy Quotes from Anna Karenina

Government is an association of men who do violence to the rest of us.

In all history there is no war which was not hatched by the governments, the governments alone, independent of the interests of the people, to whom war is always pernicious even when successful.

Instead of going to Paris to attend lectures, go to the public library, and you won’t come out for twenty years, if you really wish to learn.

We can know only that we know nothing. And that is the highest degree of human wisdom.
Leo Tolstoy Quotes from War and Peace

Only people who are capable of loving strongly can also suffer great sorrow, but this same necessity of loving serves to counteract their grief and heals them.

Leo Tolstoy Love Quotes from War and Peace

Continue reading these Leo Tolstoy Love Quotes

Love is life. All, everything that I understand, I understand only because I love. Everything is, everything exists, only because I love. Everything is united by it alone. Love is God, and to die means that I, a particle of love, shall return to the general and eternal source.

When you love someone, you love the person as they are, and not as you’d like them to be.

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

And all people live, Not by reason of any care they have for themselves, But by the love for them that is in other people.

Is it really possible to tell someone else what one feels?

All the girls in the world were divided into two classes: one class included all the girls in the world except her, and they had all the usual human feelings and were very ordinary girls; while the other class -herself alone- had no weaknesses and was superior to all humanity.
Leo Tolstoy Quote from Anna Karenina

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

The best stories don’t come from “good vs. bad” but “good vs. good.”

Boredom: the desire for desires.

Music is the shorthand of emotion.

Because of the self-confidence with which he had spoken, no one could tell whether what he said was very clever or very stupid.
Leo Tolstoy Quotes from War and Peace

We lost because we told ourselves we lost.

True life is lived when tiny changes occur.

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.
Leo Tolstoy Quote from Family Happiness

Without knowing what I am and why I am here, life is impossible.

In the name of God, stop a moment, cease your work, look around you.

There is no greatness where there is no simplicity, goodness and truth.

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

He never chooses an opinion; he just wears whatever happens to be in style.

If everyone fought for their own convictions there would be no war.
Quotes by Leo Tolstoy from War and Peace

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

Art is not a handicraft, it is the transmission of feeling the artist has experienced.

Rummaging in our souls, we often dig up something that ought to have lain there unnoticed.
Leo Tolstoy Quotes from Anna Karenina

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

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

Yes, love, …but not the love that loves for something, to gain something, or because of something, but that love that I felt for the first time, when dying, I saw my enemy and yet loved him. I knew that feeling of love which is the essence of the soul, for which no object is needed. And I know that blissful feeling now too. To love one’s neighbours; to love one’s enemies. To love everything – to Love God in all His manifestations. Some one dear to one can be loved with human love; but an enemy can only be loved with divine love. And that was why I felt such joy when I felt that I loved that man. What happened to him? Is he alive? …Loving with human love, one may pass from love to hatred; but divine love cannot change. Nothing, not even death, can shatter it. It is the very nature of the soul. And how many people I have hated in my life. And of all people none I have loved and hated more than her…. If it were only possible for me to see her once more… once, looking into those eyes to say… Leo Tolstoy Quotes from War and Peace

War is so unjust and ugly that all who wage it must try to stifle the voice of conscience within themselves.

We must not only cease our present desire for the growth of the state, but we must desire its decrease, its weakening.

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

Man lives consciously for himself, but is an unconscious instrument in the attainment of the historic, universal, aims of humanity.

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.

The greater the state, the more wrong and cruel its patriotism, and the greater is the sum of suffering upon which its power is founded.

The chief difference between words and deeds is that words are always intended for men for their approbation, but deeds can be done only for God.

Faith is the sense of life, that sense by virtue of which man does not destroy himself, but continues to live on. It is the force whereby we live.

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.

Joy can only be real if people look upon their life as a service and have a definite object in life outside themselves and their personal happiness.

A man can live and be healthy without killing animals for food; therefore, if he eats meat, he participates in taking animal life merely for the sake of his appetite.

The law condemns and punishes only actions within certain definite and narrow limits; it thereby justifies, in a way, all similar actions that lie outside those limits.

To say that a work of art is good, but incomprehensible to the majority of men, is the same as saying of some kind of food that it is very good but that most people can’t eat it.

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.

I sit on a man’s back, choking him and making him carry me, and yet assure myself and others that I am very sorry for him and wish to ease his lot by all possible means – except by getting off his back.

If there existed no external means for dimming their consciences, one-half of the men would at once shoot themselves, because to live contrary to one’s reason is a most intolerable state, and all men of our time are in such a state.

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Leo Tolstoy Quotes About Beauty

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