Leo Tolstoy, born on September 9, 1828, in Russia, is revered as one of the greatest and most influential writers in literary history. Renowned for works like “War and Peace” and “Anna Karenina,” he earned Nobel Prize in Literature nominations annually from 1902 to 1906, also receiving Peace Prize nominations in 1901, 1902, and 1909. Born into aristocracy, Tolstoy’s literary acclaim began with autobiographical works and Sevastopol Sketches based on the Crimean War. His moral crisis in the 1870s led to a profound spiritual awakening, shaping his Christian anarchist and pacifist beliefs. Tolstoy’s nonviolent resistance ideas, notably in “The Kingdom of God Is Within You,” influenced figures like Gandhi and Martin Luther King Jr. His dedication to Georgism, seen in “Resurrection,” further showcased his impact on literature and socio-economic philosophy. Despite immense praise, he never won a Nobel Prize during his lifetime, creating a lasting controversy.
Leo Tolstoy Quotes
1. “If you want to be happy, be.”
— Leo Tolstoy
2. “The two most powerful warriors are patience and time.”
— Leo Tolstoy
3. “Everyone thinks of changing the world, but no one thinks of changing himself.”
— Leo Tolstoy
4. “In the name of God, stop a moment, cease your work, look around you.”
— Leo Tolstoy
5. “The strongest of all warriors are these two – Time and Patience.”
— Leo Tolstoy
6. “We can know only that we know nothing. And that is the highest degree of human wisdom.”
— Leo Tolstoy
7. “When you love someone, you love the person as they are, and not as you’d like them to be.”
— Leo Tolstoy
8. “Love is the only way to rescue humanity from all ills.”
— Leo Tolstoy
9. “Wrong does not cease to be wrong because the majority share in it.”
— Leo Tolstoy
10. “We are asleep until we fall in love.”
— Leo Tolstoy
11. “If you look for perfection, you’ll never be content.”
— Leo Tolstoy
12. “The sole meaning of life is to serve humanity.”
— Leo Tolstoy
13. “A man is like a fraction whose numerator is what he is and whose denominator is what he thinks of himself. The larger the denominator, the smaller the fraction.”
— Leo Tolstoy
14. “Boredom: the desire for desires.”
— Leo Tolstoy
15. “Respect was invented to cover the empty place where love should be.”
— Leo Tolstoy
16. “Happy people have no history.”
— Leo Tolstoy
17. “Music is the shorthand of emotion.”
— Leo Tolstoy
18. “What counts in making a happy marriage is not so much how compatible you are but how you deal with incompatibility.”
— Leo Tolstoy
19. “If you’re not enjoying your work, you should either change your attitude or change your job.”
— Leo Tolstoy
20. “There is only one time that is important – NOW! It is the most important time because it is the only time that we have any power.”
— Leo Tolstoy
21. “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.”
— Leo Tolstoy
22. “Patience is waiting. Not passively waiting. That is laziness. But to keep going when the going is hard and slow – that is patience. The two most powerful warriors are patience and time.”
— Leo Tolstoy
23. “It’s hard to love a woman and do anything.”
— Leo Tolstoy
24. “The most important time is Now.”
— Leo Tolstoy
25. “All great literature is one of two stories; a man goes on a journey or a stranger comes to town.”
— Leo Tolstoy
26. “Read less, study less, but think more.”
— Leo Tolstoy
27. “If we admit that human life can be ruled by reason, then all possibility of life is destroyed.”
— Leo Tolstoy
28. “The key to success in life is using the good thoughts of wise people.”
— Leo Tolstoy
29. “The only purpose of education is freedom; the only method is experience.”
— Leo Tolstoy
30. “Everything comes in time to him who knows how to wait.”
— Leo Tolstoy
31. “Vengeance is mine; I will repay.”
— Leo Tolstoy
32. “An arrogant person considers himself perfect. This is the chief harm of arrogance. It interferes with a person’s main task in life – becoming a better person.”
— Leo Tolstoy
33. “There are no conditions to which a person cannot grow accustomed, especially if he sees that everyone around him lives in the same way.”
— Leo Tolstoy
34. “There is something in the human spirit that will survive and prevail, there is a tiny and brilliant light burning in the heart of man that will not go out no matter how dark the world becomes.”
— Leo Tolstoy
35. “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.”
— Leo Tolstoy
36. “Just as one candle lights another and can light thousands of other candles, so one heart illuminates another heart and can illuminate thousands of other hearts.”
— Leo Tolstoy
37. “Let us forgive each other – only then will we live in peace.”
— Leo Tolstoy
38. “As long as there are slaughterhouses there will always be battlefields.”
— Leo Tolstoy
39. “Many people have ideas on how others should change; few people have ideas on how they should change.”
— Leo Tolstoy
40. “Truth, like gold, is to be obtained not by its growth, but by washing away from it all that is not gold.”
— Leo Tolstoy
41. “The legislation of Quran will spread all over the world because it agrees with the mind, logic and wisdom.”
— Leo Tolstoy
42. “It is not enough to be a hardworking person. Think: what do you work at?”
— Leo Tolstoy
43. “It is amazing how complete is the delusion that beauty is goodness.”
— Leo Tolstoy
44. “Life is fragile and absurd.”
— Leo Tolstoy
45. “Every lie is a poison; there are no harmless lies. Only the truth is safe. Only the truth gives me consolation – it is the one unbreakable diamond.”
— Leo Tolstoy
46. “In the midst of winter, I find within me the invisible summer.”
— Leo Tolstoy
47. “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.”
— Leo Tolstoy
48. “Each person’s task in life is to become an increasingly better person.”
— Leo Tolstoy
49. “Upon meeting, you’re judged by your clothes, upon parting you’re judged by your wits.”
— Leo Tolstoy
50. “Perfection is impossible without humility. Why should I strive for perfection, if I am already good enough?”
— Leo Tolstoy
51. “All happy families resemble one another, each unhappy family is unhappy in its own way.”
— Leo Tolstoy
52. “Knowledge is real knowledge only when it is acquired by the efforts of your intellect, not by memory.”
— Leo Tolstoy
53. “For man to be able to live he must either not see the infinite, or have such an explanation of the meaning of life as will connect the finite with the infinite.”
— Leo Tolstoy
54. “When the suffering of another creature causes you to feel pain, do not submit to the initial desire to flee from the suffering one, but on the contrary, come closer, as close as you can to her who suffers, and try to help her.”
— Leo Tolstoy
55. “To abolish war it is necessary to abolish patriotism, and to abolish patriotism it is necessary first to understand that it is an evil. Tell people that patriotism is bad and most will reply, ‘Yes, bad patriotism is bad, but mine is good patriotism.’”
— Leo Tolstoy
56. “Man discovers truth by reason only, not by faith.”
— Leo Tolstoy
57. “The hero of my tale, whom I love with all the power of my soul, whom I have tried to portray in all his beauty, who has been, is, and will be beautiful, is Truth.”
— Leo Tolstoy
58. “Love is God, and to die means that I, a particle of love, shall return to the general and eternal source.”
— Leo Tolstoy
59. “True life is lived when tiny changes occur.”
— Leo Tolstoy
60. “Music is the shorthand of emotion. Emotions, which let themselves be described in words with such difficulty, are directly conveyed to man in music, and in that is its power and significance.”
— Leo Tolstoy
61. “Our whole life is taken up with anxiety for personal security, with preparations for living, so that we really never live at all.”
— Leo Tolstoy
62. “The most important knowledge is that which guides the way you lead your life.”
— Leo Tolstoy
63. “Happiness is an allegory, unhappiness a story.”
— Leo Tolstoy
64. “Life could be limitless joy, if we would only take it for what it is, in the way it is given to us.”
— Leo Tolstoy
65. “It is easier to produce ten volumes of philosophical writings than to put one principle into practice.”
— Leo Tolstoy
66. “But the law of loving others could not be discovered by reason, because it is unreasonable.”
— Leo Tolstoy
67. “Art lifts man from his personal life into the universal life.”
— Leo Tolstoy
68. “Happiness consists of living each day as if it were the first day of your honeymoon and the last day of your vacation.”
— Leo Tolstoy
69. “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.”
— Leo Tolstoy
70. “Faith is the force of life.”
— Leo Tolstoy
71. “Since corrupt people unite amongst themselves to constitute a force, then honest people must do the same.”
— Leo Tolstoy
72. “The sole meaning of life is to serve humanity by contributing to the establishment of the kingdom of God, which can only be done by the recognition and profession of the truth by every man.”
— Leo Tolstoy
73. “One of the first conditions of happiness is that the link between Man and Nature shall not be broken.”
— Leo Tolstoy
74. “God is the same everywhere.”
— Leo Tolstoy
75. “Effort is not a means to lead us to happiness. Effort itself is happiness.”
— Leo Tolstoy
76. “It seldom happens that a man changes his life through his habitual reasoning. No matter how fully he may sense the new plans and aims revealed to him by reason, he continues to plod along in old paths until his life becomes frustrating and unbearable – he finally makes the change only when his usual life can no longer be tolerated.”
— Leo Tolstoy
77. “If you make it a habit not to blame others, you will feel the growth of the ability to love in your soul, and you will see the growth of goodness in your life.”
— Leo Tolstoy
78. “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.”
— Leo Tolstoy
79. “History would be an excellent thing if only it were true.”
— Leo Tolstoy
80. “The kinder and more thoughtful a person is, the more kindness they can find in other people.”
— Leo Tolstoy
81. “Art is not a pleasure, a solace, or an amusement; art is a great matter. Art is an organ of human life, transmitting man’s reasonable perception into feeling.”
— Leo Tolstoy
82. “The most mentally deranged people are certainly those who see in others indications of insanity they do not notice in themselves.”
— Leo Tolstoy
83. “Act as if you are, and you will become such.”
— Leo Tolstoy
84. “What is important is not the length of life, but the depth of life. What is important is not to make life longer, but to take your soul out of time, as every sublime act does.”
— Leo Tolstoy
85. “There is only one way to put an end to evil, and that is to do good for evil.”
— Leo Tolstoy
86. “To say that you can love one person all your life is just like saying that one candle will continue burning as long as you live.”
— Leo Tolstoy
87. “God cannot be understood by logical reasoning but only by submission.”
— Leo Tolstoy
88. “Government is an association of men who do violence to the rest of us.”
— Leo Tolstoy
89. “The only absolute knowledge attainable by man is that life is meaningless.”
— Leo Tolstoy
90. “Am I mad, to see what others do not see, or are they mad who are responsible for all that I am seeing?”
— Leo Tolstoy
91. “The goal of our life should not be to find joy in marriage, but to bring more love and truth into the world.”
— Leo Tolstoy
92. “He felt now that he was not simply close to her, but that he did not know where he ended and she began.”
— Leo Tolstoy
93. “My principal sin is doubt. I doubt everything, and am in doubt most of the time.”
— Leo Tolstoy
94. “Here I am alive, and it’s not my fault, so I have to try and get by as best I can without hurting anybody until death takes over.”
— Leo Tolstoy
95. “But I’m glad you’ll see me as I am. Above all, I wouldn’t want people to think that I want to prove anything. I don’t want to prove anything, I just want to live; to cause no evil to anyone but myself. I have that right, haven’t I?”
— Leo Tolstoy
96. “Spring is the time of plans and projects.”
— Leo Tolstoy
97. “Happiness is in your ability to love others.”
— Leo Tolstoy
98. “I have now understood that though it seems to men that they live by care for themselves, in truth it is love alone by which they live. He who has love is in God, and God is in him, for God is love.”
— Leo Tolstoy
99. “Nietzsche was stupid and abnormal.”
— Leo Tolstoy
100. “If everyone fought for their own convictions there would be no war.”
— Leo Tolstoy
101. “The kinder and more intelligent a person is, the more kindness he can find in other people. Kindness enriches our life; with kindness mysterious things become clear, difficult things become easy, and dull things become cheerful.”
— Leo Tolstoy
102. “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
103. “Kings are the slaves of history.”
— Leo Tolstoy
104. “Art is not a handicraft, it is the transmission of feeling the artist has experienced.”
— Leo Tolstoy
105. “He never chooses an opinion; he just wears whatever happens to be in style.”
— Leo Tolstoy
106. “One can live magnificently in this world if one knows how to work and how to love.”
— Leo Tolstoy
107. “A holy spirit lives within you.”
— Leo Tolstoy
108. “All the variety, all the charm, all the beauty of life is made up of light and shadow.”
— Leo Tolstoy
109. “Seize the moments of happiness, love and be loved! That is the only reality in the world, all else is folly.”
— Leo Tolstoy
110. “Art is a microscope which the artist fixes on the secrets of his soul, and shows to people these secrets which are common to all.”
— Leo Tolstoy
111. “Love is life. All, everything that I understand, I understand only because I love. Everything is, everything exists, only because I love. Everything is united by it alone. Love is God, and to die means that I, a particle of love, shall return to the general and eternal source.”
— Leo Tolstoy
112. “The highest wisdom has but one science – the science of the whole – the science explaining the whole creation and man’s place in it.”
— Leo Tolstoy
113. “Money is a new form of slavery, and distinguishable from the old simply by the fact that it is impersonal – that there is no human relation between master and slave.”
— Leo Tolstoy
114. “I wanted movement and not a calm course of existence. I wanted excitement and danger and the chance to sacrifice myself for my love.”
— Leo Tolstoy
115. “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.”
— Leo Tolstoy
116. “To sin is a human business, to justify sins is a devilish business.”
— Leo Tolstoy
117. “The most important person is the one you are with in this moment.”
— Leo Tolstoy
118. “The more we live by our intellect, the less we understand the meaning of life.”
— Leo Tolstoy
119. “It is not beauty that endears, it’s love that makes us see beauty.”
— Leo Tolstoy
120. “All art has this characteristic-it unites people.”
— Leo Tolstoy
121. “Music is love in search of a voice.”
— Leo Tolstoy
122. “Freethinkers are those who are willing to use their minds without prejudice and without fearing to understand things that clash with their own customs, privileges, or beliefs. This state of mind is not common, but it is essential for right thinking…”
— Leo Tolstoy
123. “All, everything that I understand, I understand only because I love.”
— Leo Tolstoy
124. “If you do not know your place in the world and the meaning of your life, you should know there is something to blame; and it is not the social system, or your intellect, but the way in which you have directed your intellect.”
— Leo Tolstoy
125. “There is no greatness where there is no simplicity, goodness, and truth.”
— Leo Tolstoy
126. “Without knowing what I am and why I am here, life is impossible.”
— Leo Tolstoy
127. “Art is the uniting of the subjective with the objective, of nature with reason, of the unconscious with the conscious, and therefore art is the highest means of knowledge.”
— Leo Tolstoy
128. “Why should I live? Why should I do anything? Is there in life any purpose which the inevitable death that awaits me does not undo and destroy?”
— Leo Tolstoy
129. “Once we’re thrown off our habitual paths, we think all is lost, but it’s only here that the new and the good begins.”
— Leo Tolstoy
130. “Nothing is so necessary for a young man as the company of intelligent women.”
— Leo Tolstoy
131. “He in his madness prays for storms, and dreams that storms will bring him peace.”
— Leo Tolstoy
132. “What is important is not the quantity of your knowledge but its quality. You can know many things without knowing the most important.”
— Leo Tolstoy
133. “Anything is better than lies and deceit!”
— Leo Tolstoy
134. “Happiness is pleasure without regret.”
— Leo Tolstoy
135. “Be bad, but at least don’t be a liar, a deceiver!”
— Leo Tolstoy
136. “Very often, all the activity of the human mind is directed not in revealing the truth, but in hiding the truth.”
— Leo Tolstoy
137. “Until you do what you believe in, you don’t know whether you believe it or not.”
— Leo Tolstoy
138. “It’s all God’s will: you can die in your sleep, and God can spare you in battle.”
— Leo Tolstoy
139. “Happiness does not depend on outward things, but on the way we see them.”
— Leo Tolstoy
140. “For a few seconds they looked silently into each other’s eyes, and the distant and impossible suddenly became near, possible, and inevitable.”
— Leo Tolstoy
141. “By words, one transmits thoughts to another, by means of art, one transmits feelings.”
— Leo Tolstoy
142. “Perhaps it’s because I appreciate all I have so much that I don’t worry about what I haven’t got.”
— Leo Tolstoy
143. “Regard the society of women as a necessary unpleasantness of social life, and avoid it as much as possible.”
— Leo Tolstoy
144. “People try to do all sorts of clever and difficult things to improve life instead of doing the simplest, easiest thing- refusing to participate in activities that make life bad.”
— Leo Tolstoy
145. “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…”
— Leo Tolstoy
146. “And where love ends, hate begins.”
— Leo Tolstoy
147. “Everything depends on upbringing.”
— Leo Tolstoy
148. “Human science fragments everything in order to understand it, kills everything in order to examine it.”
— Leo Tolstoy
149. “Men need only trust in Christ’s teaching and obey it, and there will be peace on earth.”
— Leo Tolstoy
150. “One must put oneself in everyone’s position. To understand everything is to forgive everything.”
— Leo Tolstoy
151. “We lost because we told ourselves we lost.”
— Leo Tolstoy
152. “Religion reveals the meaning of life, and science only applies this meaning to the course of circumstances.”
— Leo Tolstoy
153. “Rummaging in our souls, we often dig up something that ought to have lain there unnoticed.”
— Leo Tolstoy
154. “The essence of all slavery consists in taking the product of another’s labor by force. It is immaterial whether this force be founded upon ownership of the slave or ownership of the money that he must get to live.”
— Leo Tolstoy
155. “Government is violence, Christianity is meekness, non-resistance, love. And, therefore, government cannot be Christian, and a man who wishes to be a Christian must not serve government.”
— Leo Tolstoy
156. “You can love a person dear to you with a human love, but an enemy can only be loved with divine love.”
— Leo Tolstoy
157. “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.”
— Leo Tolstoy
158. “Wealth brings a heavy purse; poverty, a light spirit.”
— Leo Tolstoy
159. “Ivan Ilych’s life had been most simple and most ordinary and therefore most terrible.”
— Leo Tolstoy
160. “There can be only one permanent revolution- a moral one: the regeneration of the inner man.”
— Leo Tolstoy
161. “In order to get power and retain it, it is necessary to love power; but love of power is not connected with goodness but with qualities that are the opposite of goodness, such as pride, cunning and cruelty.”
— Leo Tolstoy
162. “Joy can only be real if people look upon their life as a service and have a definite object in life outside themselves and their personal happiness.”
— Leo Tolstoy
163. “From the child of five to myself is but a step. But from the newborn baby to the child of five is an appalling distance.”
— Leo Tolstoy
164. “Grow spiritually and help others to do so. It is the meaning of life.”
— Leo Tolstoy
165. “If you see that some aspect of your society is bad, and you want to improve it, there is only one way to do so: you have to improve people. And in order to improve people, you begin with only ONE thing: you can become better yourself.”
— Leo Tolstoy
166. “All the true heroes of history will be forgotten and all the villains will be remembered as heroes.”
— Leo Tolstoy
167. “The most difficult subjects can be explained to the most slow-witted man if he has not formed any idea of them already; but the simplest thing cannot be made clear to the most intelligent man if he is firmly persuaded that he knows already, without a shadow of doubt, what is laid before him.”
— Leo Tolstoy
168. “My piece of bread only belongs to me when I know that everyone else has a share and that no one starves while I eat.”
— Leo Tolstoy
169. “Music makes me forget myself, my true condition, it carries me off into another state of being, one that isn’t my own.”
— Leo Tolstoy
170. “War is so unjust and ugly that all who wage it must try to stifle the voice of conscience within themselves.”
— Leo Tolstoy
171. “God knows, but He’s waiting.”
— Leo Tolstoy
172. “We imagine that when we are thrown out of our usual ruts all is lost, but it is only then that what is new and good begins. While there is life there is happiness. There is much, much before us.”
— Leo Tolstoy
173. “Dear Lord, what a madhouse the world is!”
— Leo Tolstoy
174. “And the light by which she had read the book filled with troubles, falsehoods, sorrow, and evil, flared up more brightly than ever before, lighted up for her all that had been in darkness, flickered, began to grow dim, and was quenched forever.”
— Leo Tolstoy
175. “I love her not with my mind or my imagination, but with my whole being. Loving her I feel myself to be an integral part of all God’s joyous world.”
— Leo Tolstoy
176. “Is it really possible to tell someone else what one feels?”
— Leo Tolstoy
177. “The recognition of the sanctity of the life of every man is the first and only basis of all morality.”
— Leo Tolstoy
178. “Go take the mother’s soul, and learn three truths: Learn What dwells in man, What is not given to man, and What men live by. When thou hast learnt these things, thou shalt return to heaven.”
— Leo Tolstoy
179. “Man survives earthquakes, epidemics, the horrors of disease, and all the agonies of the soul, but for all time his tormenting tragedy is, and will be, the tragedy of the bedroom.”
— Leo Tolstoy
180. “When ignorance does not know something, it says that what it does not know is stupid.”
— Leo Tolstoy
181. “Even if the absence of government really did mean anarchy in a negative, disorderly sense – which is from being the case – even then, no anarchical disorder could be worse than the position to which government has led humanity.”
— Leo Tolstoy
182. “If I know the way home and am walking along it drunkenly, is it any less the right way because I am staggering from side to side!”
— Leo Tolstoy
183. “Much unhappiness has come from things left unsaid.”
— Leo Tolstoy
184. “It is within my power either to serve God or not to serve Him. Serving Him, I add to my own good and the good of the whole world. Not serving Him, I forfeit my own good and deprive the world of that good, which was in my power to create.”
— Leo Tolstoy
185. “Genuine religion is not about speculating about God or the soul or about what happened in the past or will happen in the future; it cares only about one thing finding out exactly what should or should not be done in this lifetime.”
— Leo Tolstoy
186. “Real wisdom is not the knowledge of everything, but the knowledge of which things in life are necessary, which are less necessary, and which are completely unnecessary to know.”
— Leo Tolstoy
187. “We live in this world like a child who enters a room where a clever person is speaking. The child did not hear the beginning of the speech, and he leaves before the end, and there are certain things which he hears but does not understand.”
— Leo Tolstoy
188. “All governments are in equal measure good and evil. The best ideal is anarchy.”
— Leo Tolstoy
189. “Debates conceal rather than reveal the truth. Truth is revealed in solitude.”
— Leo Tolstoy
190. “A leader is the wave pushed ahead by the ship.”
— Leo Tolstoy
191. “Each time of life has its own kind of love.”
— Leo Tolstoy
192. “Patriotism is a survival from barbarous times which must not only be evoked and educated but which must be eradicated by all means – by preaching, persuasion, contempt, and ridicule.”
— Leo Tolstoy
193. “Vegetarianism serves as the criterion by which we know that the pursuit of moral perfection on the part of humanity is genuine and sincere.”
— Leo Tolstoy
194. “Christian love comes from the understanding that there is a unity of divine origins in oneself and in other people, and not only in people but in all living things.”
— Leo Tolstoy
195. “Man has received directly from God only one instrument wherewith to know himself and to know his relation to the universe – he has no other – and that instrument is reason.”
— Leo Tolstoy
196. “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.”
— Leo Tolstoy
197. “It is a rude feeling because it is natural only to people standing on the lowest level of morality, and expecting from other nations such outrages as they themselves are ready to inflict.”
— Leo Tolstoy
198. “A battle is won by him who is firmly resolved to win it.”
— Leo Tolstoy
199. “I’d rather end up wishing I hadn’t than end up wishing I had.”
— Leo Tolstoy
200. “To love life is to love God. Harder and more blessed than all else is to love this life in one’s sufferings, in undeserved sufferings.”
— Leo Tolstoy
