Leo Tolstoy Quotes

That one must either explain life to oneself so that it does not seem to be an evil mockery by some sort of devil, or one must shoot oneself.

~ Leo Tolstoy

the same question arose in every soul: For what, for whom, must I kill and be killed?... p982

~ Leo Tolstoy

The coffee was never served. It boiled over, spattered them all, and wet a costly tablecloth and the baroness's dress. But it served the end that was desired for it gave rise to many jests and merry peals of laughter.

~ Leo Tolstoy

I consider jealousy a humiliating and degrading feeling, and I shall never allow myself to be influenced by it.

~ Leo Tolstoy

He was nine years old; he was a child; he he knew his own soul, it was precious to him, he guarded it as the eyelid guards the eye, and without the key of love he let no one into his soul.

~ Leo Tolstoy

Why nowadays there's a new fashion every day.

~ Leo Tolstoy

He was a passionate adherent of the new ideas and of Speransky, and the busiest purveyor of news in Petersburg, one of those men who choose their opinions like their clothes—according to the fashion—but for that very reason seem the most vehement partisans

~ Leo Tolstoy

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

~ Leo Tolstoy

There will be today, there will be tomorrow, there will be always, and there was yesterday, and there was the day before...

~ Leo Tolstoy

As often happens between people who have chosen different ways, each of them, while rationally justifying the other's activity, despised it in his heart. To each of them it seemed that the life he led was the only real life, and the one his friend led was a mere illusion.

~ Leo Tolstoy

It's not given to people to judge what's right or wrong. People have eternally been mistaken and will be mistaken, and in nothing more than in what they consider right and wrong.

~ Leo Tolstoy

He stepped down, avoiding any long look at her as one avoids long looks at the sun, but seeing her as one sees the sun, without looking.

~ Leo Tolstoy

But that's the whole aim of civilization: to make everything a source of enjoyment.

~ Leo Tolstoy

Man can be master of nothing while he fears death, but he who does not fear it possesses all. If there were no suffering, man would not know his limitations, would not know himself. The hardest thing is to be able in your soul to unite the meaning of all. To unite all? Pierre asked himself. No, not to unite. Thoughts cannot be united, but to harness all these thoughts together is what we need! Yes, one must harness them, must harness them!

~ Leo Tolstoy

Well, what of it? I've not given up thinking of death. It's true that it's high time I was dead; and that all this is nonsense. It's the truth I'm telling you. I do value my idea and my work awfully; but in reality only consider this: all this world of ours is nothing but a speck of mildew, which has grown up on a tiny planet. And for us to suppose we can have something great - ideas, work - it's all dust and ashes.

~ Leo Tolstoy

Patriotism in its simplest, clearest and most indubitable signification is nothing else but a means of obtaining for the rulers their ambitions and covetous desires, and for the ruled the abdication of human dignity, reason, conscience, and a slavish enthrallment to those in power.

~ Leo Tolstoy

It would, therefore, seem obvious that patriotism as a feeling is bad and harmful, and as a doctrine is stupid. For it is clear that if each people and each State considers itself the best of peoples and States, they all live in a gross and harmful delusion.

~ Leo Tolstoy

When the peasants and their song had vanished from his sight and hearing, a heavy feeling of anguish at his loneliness, his bodily idleness, his hostility to this world, came over him...It was all drowned in the sea of cheerful common labor. God had given the day, God had given the strength. Both day and strength had been devoted to labour and in that lay the reward...Levin had often admired this life, had often experienced a feeling of envy for the people who lived this life, but that day for the first time...the thought came clearly to Levin that it was up to him to change that so burdensome, idle, artificial and individual life he lived into this laborious, pure and common, lovely life.

~ Leo Tolstoy

Just when the question of how to live had become clearer to him, a new insoluble problem presented itself - Death.

~ Leo Tolstoy

Though the doctors treated him, let his blood, and gave him medications to drink, he nevertheless recovered.

~ Leo Tolstoy

The Lord had given them the day and the Lord had given them the strength. And the day and the strength had been dedicated to labor, and the labor was its reward. Who was the labor for? What would be its fruits? These were irrelevant and idle questions.

~ Leo Tolstoy

Perhaps it's because I appreciate all I have so much that I don't worry about what I haven't got.

~ Leo Tolstoy

...there was apparent in all a sort of anxiety, a softening of the heart, and a consciousness of some great, unfathomable mystery being accomplished... the most solemn mystery in the world was being accomplished. Evening passed, night came on. And the feeling of suspense and softening of the heart before the unfathomable did not wane, but grew more intense. No one slept.

~ Leo Tolstoy

The very same thing, don't you see, may be looked at tragically, and turned into a misery, or it may be looked at simply and even humorously. Possibly you are inclined to look at things too tragically.

~ Leo Tolstoy

A man on a thousand mile walk has to forget his goal and say to himself every morning, 'Today I'm going to cover twenty-five miles and then rest up and sleep.

~ Leo Tolstoy

The animalism of the brute nature in man is disgusting', he thought, 'but as long as it remains in its naked form we observe it from the height of our spiritual life and despise it; and - whether one has fallen or resisted - one remains what one was before. But when that same animalism hides under a cloak of poetry and aesthetic feeling and demands our worship - then we are swallowed up by it completely and worship animalism, no longer distinguishing good from evil. Then it is awful!

~ Leo Tolstoy

A man could not be prevented from making himself a big wax doll, and kissing it. But if the man were to come with the doll and sit before a man in love, and begin caressing his doll as the lover caressed the woman he loved, it would be distastefulto the lover. Just such a distasteful sensation was what Mihailov felt at the sight of Vronsky’s painting: he felt it both ludicrous and irritating, both pitiable and offensive.

~ Leo Tolstoy

He did what heroes do after their work is accomplished, he died.

~ Leo Tolstoy

They were dealt with as in war, and they naturally employed the means that were used against them.

~ Leo Tolstoy

Be bad, but at least don't be a liar, a deceiver!

~ Leo Tolstoy

This is dreadful! Not the suffering and death of the animals, but that man suppresses in himself, unnecessarily, the highest spiritual capacity—that of sympathy and pity toward living creatures like himself—and by violating his own feelings becomes cruel. And how deeply seated in the human heart is the injunction not to take life!

~ Leo Tolstoy

Read the best books first, otherwise you’ll find you do not have time. - Henry David Thoreau

~ Leo Tolstoy

What is reason given me for, if I am not to use it to avoid bringing unhappy beings into the world!

~ Leo Tolstoy

My field was God’s earth. Wherever I ploughed, there was my field. Land was free. It was a thing no man called his own. Labor was the only thing men called their own.

~ Leo Tolstoy

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

~ Leo Tolstoy

He disliked contradiction, and still more, arguments that were continually skipping from one thing to another, introducing new and disconnected points, so that there was no knowing to which to reply.

~ Leo Tolstoy

Everyone had something disparaging to say about the unfortunate Maltyshcheva, and the conversation began crackling merrily like a kindling bonfire.

~ Leo Tolstoy

There are no conditions to which a man cannot become used, especially if he sees that all around him are living in the same way.

~ Leo Tolstoy

Art is a human activity consisting in this that one man consciously by means of external signs hands on to others feelings he has worked through and other people are infected by these feelings and also experience them.

~ Leo Tolstoy

Boredom: the desire for desires.

~ Leo Tolstoy