Quotes By Leo Tolstoy

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.

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.

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

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.

Man lives consciously for himself, but is an unconscious instrument in the attainment of the historic, universal, aims of humanity.

War is so unjust and ugly that all who wage it must try to stifle the voice of conscience within themselves.

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

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

True life is lived when tiny changes occur.

In the name of God, stop a moment, cease your work, look around you.

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

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.

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

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.

If you want to be happy, be.

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

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.

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.