Leo Tolstoy Quotes: 72

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

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

  Anna Karenina

• True life is lived when tiny changes occur.

• If you look for perfection, you'll never be content.

  Anna Karenina

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

  The Kreutzer Sonata

• I think... if it is true that there are as many minds as there are heads, then there are as many kinds of love as there are hearts.

  Anna Karenina

• 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.

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

• Respect was invented to cover the empty place where love should be.

  Anna Karenina

• He stepped down, trying not to look long at her, as if she were the sun, yet he saw her, like the sun, even without looking.

  Anna Karenina

• If, then, I were asked for the most important advice I could give, that which I considered to be the most useful to the men of our century, I should simply say: in the name of God, stop a moment, cease your work, look around you.

  Essays, Letters and Miscellanies

• Only people who are capable of loving strongly can also suffer great sorrow, but this same necessity of loving serves to counteract their grief and heals them.

• We can know only that we know nothing. And that is the highest degree of human wisdom.

  War and Peace

• If you want to be happy, be.

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

• Rummaging in our souls, we often dig up something that ought to have lain there unnoticed.

  Anna Karenina

• A quiet secluded life in the country, with the possibility of being useful to people to whom it is easy to do good, and who are not accustomed to have it done to them; then work which one hopes may be of some use; then rest, nature, books, music, love for one's neighbor — such is my idea of happiness.

  Family Happiness

• Love. The reason I dislike that word is that it means too much for me, far more than you can understand."- Anna Karenina {Anna Karenina}

  Anna Karenina

• Wrong does not cease to be wrong because the majority share in it.

  A Confession

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

• I've always loved you, and when you love someone, you love the whole person, just as he or she is, and not as you would like them to be.

  Anna Karenina

• Boredom: the desire for desires.

• Muhammad has always been standing higher than the Christianity. He does not consider god as a human being and never makes himself equal to God. Muslims worship nothing except God and Muhammad is his Messenger. There is no any mystery and secret in it.

• There is no greatness where there is not simplicity, goodness, and truth.

  War and Peace

• The best stories don't come from "good vs. bad"but "good vs. good.

• They've got no idea what happiness is, they don't know that without this love there is no happiness or unhappiness for us--there is no life.

  Anna Karenina

• If you love me as you say you do,' she whispered, 'make it so that I am at peace.

  Anna Karenina

• It's hard to love a woman and do anything.

  Anna Karenina

• Pierre was right when he said that one must believe in the possibility of happiness in order to be happy, and I now believe in it. Let the dead bury the dead, but while I'm alive, I must live and be happy.

  War and Peace

• You can love a person dear to you with a human love, but an enemy can only be loved with divine love.

  War and Peace

• The whole world is divided for me into two parts: one is she, and there is all happiness, hope, light; the other is where she is not, and there is dejection and darkness...

  War and Peace

• Love those you hate you.

  Anna Karenina

• He felt now that he was not simply close to her, but that he did not know where he ended and she began.

• Seize the moments of happiness, love and be loved! That is the only reality in the world, all else is folly. It is the one thing we are interested in here.

• If we admit that human life can be ruled by reason, then all possibility of life is destroyed.

  War and Peace

• He was afraid of defiling the love which filled his soul.

  Anna Karenina

• We are asleep until we fall in Love!

  War and Peace

• I'm like a starving man who has been given food. Maybe he's cold, and his clothes are torn, and he's ashamed, but he's not unhappy.

  Anna Karenina

• I wanted movement and not a calm course of existence. I wanted excitement and danger and the chance to sacrifice myself for my love.

• Man cannot possess anything as long as he fears death. But to him who does not fear it, everything belongs. If there was no suffering, man would not know his limits, would not know himself.

  War and Peace

• Everything I know, I know because of love.

  War and Peace

• To tell the truth is very difficult, and young people are rarely capable of it.

• It's all God's will: you can die in your sleep, and God can spare you in battle.

  War and Peace

• Human science fragments everything in order to understand it, kills everything in order to examine it.

  War and Peace

• There are no conditions to which a person cannot grow accustomed, especially if he sees that everyone around him lives in the same way.

  Anna Karenina

• And you know, there's less charm in life when you think about death--but it's more peaceful.

  Anna Karenina

• We walked to meet each other up at the time of our love and then we have been irresistibly drifting in different directions, and there's no altering that.

  Anna Karenina

• God is the same everywhere.

  War and Peace

• Life did not stop, and one had to live.

  War and Peace

• In the best, the friendliest and simplest relations flattery or praise is necessary, just as grease is necessary to keep wheels turning.

  War and Peace

• To educate the peasantry, three things are needed: schools, schools and schools.

  Anna Karenina

• In the midst of winter, I find within me the invisible summer...

  The Kingdom of God Is Within You

• If goodness has causes, it is not goodness; if it has effects, a reward, it is not goodness either. So goodness is outside the chain of cause and effect.

  Anna Karenina

• Ah, if everyone was as sensitive as you! There's no girl who hasn't gone through that. And it's all so unimportant!

  Anna Karenina

• People of limited intelligence are fond of talking about "these days,"imagining that they have discovered and appraised the peculiarities of "these days"and that human nature changes with the times.

• Everything ends in death, everything. Death is terrible.

  War and Peace

• And where love ends, hate begins

  Anna Karenina

• Without the support from religion--remember, we talked about it--no father, using only his own resources, would be able to bring up a child.

  Anna Karenina

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

• Without knowledge of what I am and why I am here, it is impossible to live, and since I cannot know that, I cannot live either. In an infinity of time, in an infinity of matter, and an infinity of space a bubble-organism emerges while will exist for a little time and then burst, and that bubble am I.

  Anna Karenina

• I wanted movement and not a calm course of existence. I wanted excitement and the chance to sacrifice myself for my love. I felt it in myself a superabundance of energy which found no outlet in our quiet life.

  Family Happiness

• He is not apprehended by reason, but by life.

  War and Peace

• If there is a God and future life, there is truth and good, and man's highest happiness consists in striving to attain them. We must live, we must love, and we must believe that we live not only today on this scrap of earth, but have lived and shall live

  War and Peace

• Happiness consists in always aspiring perfection, the pause in any level in perfection is the pause of happiness

• 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.

  War and Peace

• Let fear once get possession of the soul, and it does not readily yield its place to another sentiment.Sebastopol by Leo Tolstoy

  Sebastopol in December

• One must try to make one's life as pleasant as possible. I'm alive and it's not my fault, which means I must somehow go on living the best I can, without bothering anybody, until I die.''But what makes you live? With such thoughts, you'll sit without moving, without undertaking anything...''Life won't leave one alone as it is.

  War and Peace

• There are many faiths, but the spirit is one — in me, and in you, and in him. So that if everyone believes himself, all will be united; everyone be himself and all will be as one.

  Resurrection

• A writer is dear and necessary for us only in the measure of which he reveals to us the inner workings of his very soul.

• I led the life of so many other so-called respectable people,—that is, in debauchery. And like the majority, while leading the life of a debauche, I was convinced that I was a man of irreproachable morality.

  Kreutzer Sonata and Family Happiness

• Where there has been true science, art has always been its exponent.

  On the Significance of Science and Art

• Whatever we may say about the soul going to the sky... we know there is no sky but only an atmosphere.