Quotes By Leo Tolstoy

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

True life is lived when tiny changes occur.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Boredom: the desire for desires.

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

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