Quotes By Leo Tolstoy

If you want to be happy, be.

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.

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.

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

The sole meaning of life is to serve humanity.

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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

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

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.

Nietzsche was stupid and abnormal.

Music is the shorthand of emotion.

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.

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.

The two most powerful warriors are patience and time.

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

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

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

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

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.

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

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.

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

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.