Leo Tolstoy Quotes

Faith is the force of life.

The teaching of the church, theoretically astute, is a lie in practice and a compound of vulgar superstitions and sorcery.

I have to create a circle of reading for myself: Epictetus, Marcus Aurelius, Lao-Tzu, Buddha, Pascal, The New Testament. This is also necessary for all people.

Do not be sad about what you do not have. Instead, be happy about what you do have. If you will be sad about what you don't have, you will not be happy about what you do have.

All the true heroes of history will be forgotten and all the villains will be remembered as heroes.

For if we allow that human life is always guided by reason, we destroy the premise that life is possible at all.

it is hard for anyone who is dissatisfied not to blame some one else, and especially the person nearest of all to him, for the ground of his dissatisfaction.

I imagine, joking apart, that to know love, one must make mistakes and then correct them.

Music is the shorthand of emotion.

Rivers are places that renew our spirit, connect us with our past, and link us directly with the flow and rhythm of the natural world.

One ought only to write when one leaves a piece of one's own flesh in the inkpot, each time one dips one's pen.

Since corrupt people unite amongst themselves to constitute a force, then honest people must do the same.

Governments not only are not necessary, but are harmful and most highly immoral institutions.

Happiness is an allegory, unhappiness a story.

...the more he did nothing, the less time he had to do anything.

Love does not exist. There exists the physical need for intercourse, and the rational need for a mate in life

Am I mad, to see what others do not see, or are they mad who are responsible for all that I am seeing?

Death destroys the body, as the scaffolding is destroyed after the building is up and finished. And he whose building is up rejoices at the destruction of the scaffolding and of the body.

By words one transmits thoughts to another, by means of art, one transmits feelings.

I must write each day without fail, not so much for the success of the work, as in order not to get out of my routine.

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

They ought to find out how to vaccinate for love, like smallpox.

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

To get rid of an enemy one must love him.

It is by those who have suffered that the world has been advanced.

Man must not check his reason by tradition, but, contrariwise, must check tradition by reason.

Good fiction doesn't come out of the basic conflict of good versus bad. Instead, it comes out of a conflict between good and good.

Where there is a man who does not labor because another is compelled to work for him, there slavery is.

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

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.

Human love serves to love those dear to us but to love one's enemies we need divine love.

As long as there are slaughterhouses there will be battlefields. A vegetarian diet is the acid test of humanitarianism.

All governments are in equal measure good and evil. The best ideal is anarchy.

Progress consists only in the greater clarification of answers to the basic questions of life.

A Gentleman is a man who will pay his gambling debts even when he knows he has been cheated.

Science is meaningless because it gives no answer to our question, the only question important for us: 'What shall we do and how shall we live?'

Pure and complete sorrow is as impossible as pure and complete joy.

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.

it's much better to do good in a way that no one knows anything about it.

Talent is the capacity to direct concentrated attention upon the subject: "the gift of seeing what others have not seen.

Every man and every living creature has a sacred right to the gladness of springtime.

Much unhappiness has come from things left unsaid

Everything I know, I know because of love.

Happiness does not depend on outward things, but on the way we see them.

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.

But the law of loving others could not be discovered by reason, because it is unreasonable.

I can't understand how anyone can write without rewriting everything over and over again.

There can be only one permanent revolution- a moral one: the regeneration of the inner man.

"A real work of art destroys, in the consciousness of the receiver, the separation between himself and the artist."

Sometimes she did not know what she feared, what she desired: whether she feared or desired what had been or what would be, and precisely what she desired, she did not know.