Quotes by Leo Tolstoy

Let us forgive each other -- only then will we live in peace.

If you want to be happy, be.

True life is lived when tiny changes occur.

Happiness is in your ability to love others.

Our body is a machine for living.

Life is fragile and absurd.

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.

If everyone fought for their own convictions there would be no war.

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

Everything comes in time to him who knows how to wait.

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

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.

The sole meaning of life is to serve humanity.

A bad mood is often the reason for blaming others; but very often blaming others causes bad feelings in us: The more we blame others, the worse we feel.

Art is a human activity having for its purpose the transmission to others of the highest and best feelings to which men have risen.

Happy families are all alike; every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way.

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.

A holy spirit lives within you.

Every misconception is a poison: there are no harmless misconceptions.

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

It's much better to do good in a way that no one knows anything about it.

Life is a transition from one form to another. The life of this world is the material for a new form.

The Jew is eternal. He is the embodiment of eternity.

Everybody thinks of changing humanity and nobody thinks of changing himself.

A cigar is a sort of thing, not exactly a pleasure, but the crown and outward sign of pleasure.

What counts in making a happy marriage is not so much how compatible you are, but how you deal with incompatibility.

Time is a perpetual motion, without a single moment of rest.

The first rule of achieving goodness is this: think only about self-perfection.

The earth is the general and equal possession of all humanity and therefore cannot be the property of individuals.

The Jew is the emblem of civil and religious toleration. Love the stranger and the sojourner, Moses commands, because you have been strangers in the land of Egypt.

Pure and complete is as impossible as pure and complete joy.

Boredom, the desire for desires.

These men are looked upon as the most malevolent, the most dangerous, and generally as the most unbelieving of all human beings, and yet they are the only men of our time believing in the Gospel doctrine, if not as a whole, at least in part.

The cudgel of the people's war was lifted with all its menacing and majestic might, and caring nothing for good taste and procedure, with dull-witted simplicity but sound judgement it rose and fell, making no distinctions.

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

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

If you want to be happy, be!

Follow the best way of life you possibly can, and habit will make this way suitable and pleasant to you.

I often think how unfairly life's good fortune is sometimes distributed.

Love those you hate you.

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

And the cause of everything is that which we call God.

I don't think anything, she said, but I always loved you, and if one loves anyone, one loves the whole person, just as they are and not as one would like them to be.

Anna smiled,as people smile at the weaknesses of those they love.

Whatever our fate is or may be, we have made it and do not complain of it.

I wanted movement and not a calm course of existence. I wanted excitement and the chance to sacrifice myself for my love. I felt it in myself a superabundance of energy which found no outlet in our quiet life.

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

There are no conditions to which a person cannot grow accustomed, especially if he sees that everyone around him lives in the same way.

Except life's usual answer to the most complex and insoluble questions. That answer is: live in the needs of the day, that is find forgetfulness.

What's all this love of arguing? No one ever convinces anyone else.

Debates conceal rather than reveal the truth. Truth is revealed in solitude.

Can it be that I have overlooked something, that there is something which I have failed to understand? Is it not possible that this state of despair is common to everyone?

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.

He began to pray, and was obsessed by the fear lest he should die without having done any good in the world; he longed to live, and to live so as to achieve the renunciation of self.

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.

You're not going to be different ... you're going to be the same as you've always been; with doubts, everlasting dissatisfaction with yourself, vain efforts to amend, and falls, and everlasting expectation, of a happiness which you won't get, and which isn't possible for you.

I ask one thing only: I ask for the right to hope, to suffer as I do. But if even that cannot be, command me to disappear, and I disappear. You shall not see me if my presence is distasteful to you.

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.

But really, why should you distress yourself? Whoever stirs up the past -- out with his eye! Who is not a sinner before God and to blame before the Tsar, as the saying is?

He looked at her as a man looks at a faded flower he has gathered , with difficulty recognizing the beauty for which he picked and ruined it.

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

In precisely the same way the specialty of government is not to obey, but to enforce obedience. And a government is only a government so long as it can make itself obeyed, and therefore it always strives for that and will never willingly abandon its power.

It is not enough to be a hardworking person. Think: what do you work at?

Just fancy! One can hear and see the grass growing,' thought Levin, as he noticed wet slate-coloured aspen leaf move close to the point of a blade of grass.

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

Once we're thrown off our habitual paths, we think all is lost, but it's only here that the new and the good begins.

Every man had his personal habits, passions, and impulses toward goodness, beauty, and truth.

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

The activity of art is... as important as the activity of language itself, and as universal.

The improvement of life was only accomplished to the extent to which it was based on a change of consciousness, that is, to the extent to which the law of violence was replaced in men's consciousness by the law of love.

Nekhlúdoff clearly saw that all these people were arrested, locked up, exiled, not really because they transgressed against justice or behaved unlawfully, but only because they were an obstacle hindering the officials and the rich from enjoying the property they had taken away from the people.

But Levin was in love, and so it seemed to him that Kitty was so perfect in every respect that she was a creature far above everything earthly; and that he was a creature so low and so earthly that it could not even be conceived that other people and she herself could regard him as worthy of her.

Often a man goes on for years imaging that the religious teaching that had been imparted to him since childhood is still intact, while all the time there is not a trace of it left in him.

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. The Jew is eternal. He is the embodiment of eternity.

Blessed are the peacemakers; theirs is the kingdom of heaven.

In order to get the power and retain it, it is necessary to love power; but love of power is not connected with goodness, but with qualities which are the opposite of goodness, such as pride, cunning, cruelty.

The only happy marriages I know are arranged ones.

How can one be well...when one suffers morally?

But she was not even grateful to him for it; nothing good on Pierre's part seemed to her to be an effort, it seemed so natural for him to be kind to everyone that there was no merit in his kindness.

One is ashamed to say how little is needed for all men to be delivered from those calamities which now oppress them; it is only needful not to lie.

There was no answer, except the general answer life gives to all the most complex and insoluble questions. That answer is: one must live for the needs of the day, in other words, become oblivious.

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.

He felt like a man who, after straining his eyes to peer into the remote distance, finds what he was seeking at his very feet. All his life he had been looking over the heads of those around him, while he had only to look before him without straining his eyes. p 1320.

Upon meeting, you're judged by your clothes, upon parting you're judged by your wits.

And people strive not for the good in life, but for goods they can call their own.

Life is too long to say anything definitely; always say perhaps.

He was one of those diplomats who like and know how to work, and, despite his laziness, he occasionally spent nights at his desk.

By patriotism is meant, not only spontaneous, instinctive love for one's own nation, and preference for it above all other nations, but also the belief that such love and preference are good and useful.

You say: I am not free. But I have raised and lowered my arm. Everyone understands that this illogical answer is an irrefutable proof of freedom.

As often happens between men who have chosen different pursuits, each, while in argument justifying the other's activity, despised it in the depth of his heart.

Well, pray if you like, only you'd do better to use your judgment.

If goodness has causes, it is not goodness; if it has effects, a reward, it is not goodness either. So goodness is outside the chain of cause and effect.

I can't understand how anyone can write without rewriting everything over and over again.