Leo Tolstoy Quotes

Natasha, with a vigorous turn from her heel on to her toe, walked over to the middle of the room and stood still... Natasha took the first note, her throat swelled, her bosom heaved, a serious expression came into her face. She was thinking of no one and of nothing at that moment, and from her smiling mouth poured forth notes, those notes that anyone can produce at the same intervals, and hold for the same length of time, yet a thousand times leave us cold, and the thousand and first time they set us thrilling and weeping.

~ Leo Tolstoy

What is music? What does it do to us? And why does it do to us what it does? People say that music has an uplifting effect on the soul: what rot! It isn’t true. It’s true that it has an effect, it has a terrible effect on me, at any rate, but it has nothing to do with any uplifting of the soul. Its effect on the soul is neither uplifting nor degrading — it merely irritates me.

~ Leo Tolstoy

But these were essentially the accoutrements that appeal to all people who are not actually rich but who want to look rich, though all they manage to do is look like each other: damasks, ebony, plants, rugs and bronzes, anything dark and gleaming-everything that all people of a certain class affect so as to be like all other people of a certain class. And his arrangements looked so much like everyone else's that they were unremarkable, though he saw them as something truly distinctive.

~ Leo Tolstoy

Doctoring her seemed to her as absurd as putting together the pieces of a broken vase. Her heart was broken. Why would they try to cure her with pills and powders?

~ Leo Tolstoy

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

All happy families are alike, each unhappy family is unhappy in its own way.

~ Leo Tolstoy

It was as if the main screw in his head, which held his whole life together, had become stripped. The screw would not go in, would not come out, but turned in the same groove without catching hold, and it was impossible to stop turning it.

~ Leo Tolstoy

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

Power is the sum total of the wills of the mass, transfered by express or tactic agreement to rulers chosen by the masses.

~ Leo Tolstoy

Power is a word the meaning of which we do not understand.

~ Leo Tolstoy

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.

~ Leo Tolstoy

The sanctification of political power by Christianity is blasphemy, it is the negation of Christianity.

~ Leo Tolstoy

One must be cunning and wicked in this world.

~ Leo Tolstoy

Are we not all flung into the world for no other purpose than to hate each other, and so to torture ourselves and one another?

~ Leo Tolstoy

I think that when you remember, remember, remember everything like that, you could go on until you remember what was there before you were in the world.

~ Leo Tolstoy

I was wrong when I said that I did not regret the past. I do regret it; I weep for the past love which can never return. Who is to blame, I do not know. Love remains, but not the old love; its place remains, but it is all wasted away and has lost all strength and substance; recollections are still left, and gratitude; but...

~ Leo Tolstoy

Society in itself is no great harm, but unsatisfied social aspirations are a bad and ugly business. We must certainly accept, and we will.

~ Leo Tolstoy

Just imagine the existence of a man - let us call him A - who has left youth far behind, and of a woman whom we may call B, who is young and happy and has seen nothing as yet of life or of the world. Family circumstances of various kinds brought them together, and he grew to love her as a daughter, and had no fear that his love would change its nature. But he forgot that B was so young, that life was still a May-game to her and that it was easy to fall in love with her in a different way, and that this would amuse her. He made a mistake and was suddenly aware of another feeling, as heavy as remorse, making its way into his heart, and he was afraid. He was afraid that their old friendly relations would be destroyed, and he made up his mind to go away before that happened.

~ Leo Tolstoy

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

~ Leo Tolstoy

...but most of all he liked to listen to stories of real life. He smiled gleefully as he listened to such stories, putting in words and asking questions, all aiming at bringing out clearly the moral beauty of the action of which he was told. Attachments, friendships, love, as Pierre understood them, Karataev had none, but he loved and lived on affectionate terms with every creature with whom he was thrown in life, and especially so with man- not with any particular man, but with the men that happened to be before his eyes.But his life, as he looked at it, had no meaning as a separate life. It only had meaning as part of a whole, of which he was at all times conscious.

~ Leo Tolstoy

Pierre had for the first time experienced that strange and fascinating feeling in the Slobodsky palace, when he suddenly felt that wealth and power and life, all that men build up and guard with such effort ,is only worth anything through the joy with which it can all be cast away.

~ Leo Tolstoy

To love life is to love God.

~ Leo Tolstoy

Yet that grief and this joy were alike outside all the ordinary conditions of life; they were loop-holes, as it were, in that ordinary life through which there came glimpses of something sublime. And in the contemplation of this sublime something the soul was exalted to inconceivable heights of which it had before had no conception which reason lagged behind, unable to keep up with it.

~ Leo Tolstoy

Remember that there is onlyone important time and is Now. The present moment isthe only time over which we have dominion. The mostimportant person is always the person with whom youare, who is right before you, for who knows if you willhave dealings with any other person in the future. Themost important pursuit is making that person, the onestanding at you side, happy, for that alone is the pursuitof life.

~ Leo Tolstoy

...those children were already beginning to repay her care by affording her small joys. These joys were so trifling as to be as imperceptible as grains of gold among the sand, and in moments of depression she saw nothing but sand; yet there were brighter moments when she felt nothing but joy, saw nothing but the gold.

~ Leo Tolstoy

Hypocrisy in anything whatever may deceive the cleverest and most penetrating man, but the least wide-awake of children recognizes it, and is revolted by it, however ingeniously it may be disguised.

~ Leo Tolstoy

Peaceful with six children Darya Alexandrova could not be...Rare indeed were the brief periods of peace...hard though it was for the mother to bear the dread of illness, the illnesses themselves, and the grief of seeing signs of evil propensities in her children--the children themselves were even now repaying her in small joys for her sufferings. Those joys were so small that they passed unnoticed, like gold in sand, and at bad moments she could see nothing but the pain, nothing but sand; but there were good moments too when she saw nothing but the joy, nothing but gold.Now in the solitude of the country, she began to be more and more frequently aware of those joys. Often, looking at them, she would make every possible effort to persuade herself that she was mistaken, that she as a mother was partial to her children. All the same, she could not help saying to herself that she had charming children, all six of them in different ways, but a set of children such as is not often to be met with, and she was happy in them, and proud of them.

~ Leo Tolstoy

But there was another class of people, the real people. To this class they all belonged, and in it the great thing was to be elegant, generous, plucky, gay, to abandon oneself without a blush to every passion, and to laugh at everything else.

~ Leo Tolstoy

It occurred to him that his scarcely perceptible attempts to struggle against what was considered good by the most highly placed people, those scarcely noticeable impulses which he had immediately suppressed, might have been the real thing, and all the rest false.

~ Leo Tolstoy

Imagine a problem in psychology: to find a way of getting people in our day and age - Christians, humanitarians, nice, kind people - to commit the most heinous crimes without feeling any guilt. There is only one solution - doing just what we do now: you make them governors, superintendents, officers or policemen, a process which, first of all, presupposes acceptance of something that goes by the name of government service and allows people to be treated like inanimate objects, precluding any humane or brotherly relationships, and, secondly, ensures that people working for this government service must be so interdependent that responsibility for any consequences of the way they treat people never devolves on any one of them individually.

~ Leo Tolstoy

We are shocked by thieves taking pride in their clever touch, prostitutes in their depravity and murderers in their callousness. But it is shocking only because the atmosphere of the circles they move in is restricted, and - what matters most - we are on the outside. But isn't the same thing happening when rich men take pride in their wealth (which is theft), military commanders in their victories (which are murder) and rulers in their power (which is violence)? We do not see them as people who corrupt the concept of life, or good and evil, in order to justify their own situation, but only because the circles of people who share these corrupt concepts are wider, and we belong to them.

~ Leo Tolstoy

God gave the day, God gave the strength.

~ Leo Tolstoy

Darkness had fallen upon everything for him; but just because of this darkness he felt that the one guiding clue in the darkness was his work, and he clutched it and clung to it with all his strength.

~ Leo Tolstoy

The worker picked up Pakhom’s spade, dug a grave, and buried him - six feet from head to heel, exactly the amount of land a man needs.

~ Leo Tolstoy

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

~ Leo Tolstoy

You need feeling, emotion, to create. You can't create out of indifference.

~ Leo Tolstoy

I do not live when I loose belief in the existence of God. I should long ago have killed myself had I not had a dim hope of finding Him. I live really live only when I feel him and seek Him

~ Leo Tolstoy

I felt a wish never to leave that room - a wish that dawn might never come, that my present frame of mind might never change.

~ Leo Tolstoy

If a teacher has only love for the cause, it will be a good teacher. If a teacher has only love for student, as a father, mother, he will be better than the teacher, who read all the books, but has no love for the cause, nor to the students. If the teacher combines love to the cause and to his disciples, he is the perfect teacher.

~ Leo Tolstoy

Maybe its because i rejoice over what i have and don't grieve over what i don't have.

~ Leo Tolstoy