Top 30 Leo Tolstoy Quotes

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.

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.

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.

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

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

Boredom: the desire for desires.

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.

Music is the shorthand of emotion.

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.

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.

We lost because we told ourselves we lost.

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

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.

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

The sole meaning of life is to serve humanity.

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

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

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.

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

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

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

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.

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

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.

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

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.

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

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.

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