Leo Tolstoy Quotes

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

- Leo Tolstoy

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

- Leo Tolstoy

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.

- Leo Tolstoy

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.

- Leo Tolstoy

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

- Leo Tolstoy

The two most powerful warriors are patience and time.

- Leo Tolstoy

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.

- Leo Tolstoy

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

- Leo Tolstoy

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.

- Leo Tolstoy

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

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.

- Leo Tolstoy

Nietzsche was stupid and abnormal.

- Leo Tolstoy

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

- Leo Tolstoy

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

- Leo Tolstoy

The sole meaning of life is to serve humanity.

- Leo Tolstoy

Music is the shorthand of emotion.

- Leo Tolstoy

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.

- Leo Tolstoy

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.

- Leo Tolstoy

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.

- Leo Tolstoy

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.

- Leo Tolstoy

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

- Leo Tolstoy

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

- Leo Tolstoy

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

- Leo Tolstoy

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

- Leo Tolstoy

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.

- Leo Tolstoy

All happy families resemble one another, each unhappy family is unhappy in its own way.

- Leo Tolstoy

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

- Leo Tolstoy

An arrogant person considers himself perfect. This is the chief harm of arrogance. It interferes with a person's main task in life - becoming a better person.

- Leo Tolstoy

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.

- Leo Tolstoy

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.

- Leo Tolstoy

It is amazing how complete is the delusion that beauty is goodness.

- Leo Tolstoy

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

- Leo Tolstoy

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.

- Leo Tolstoy

True life is lived when tiny changes occur.

- Leo Tolstoy

Everyone thinks of changing the world, but no one thinks of changing himself.

- Leo Tolstoy

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

- Leo Tolstoy

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

- Leo Tolstoy

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

- Leo Tolstoy

If you want to be happy, be.

- Leo Tolstoy

We lost because we told ourselves we lost.

- Leo Tolstoy

Boredom: the desire for desires.

- Leo Tolstoy

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

- Leo Tolstoy