Leo Tolstoy Quotes

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

Leo Tolstoy
This is where the strength of the physician lies, be he a quack, a homeopath or an allopath. He supplies the perennial demand for comfort, the craving for sympathy that every human sufferer feels.

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

Leo Tolstoy
The French army melted away at the uniform rate of a mathematical progression...

Leo Tolstoy
At moments of departure and a change of life, people capable of reflecting on their actions usually get into a serious state of mind. At these moments they usually take stock of the past and make plans for the future.

Leo Tolstoy
Man's mind cannot grasp the causes of events in their completeness, but the desire to find the causes is implanted in man's soul.

Leo Tolstoy
Men pray to the Almighty to relieve poverty. But poverty comes not from God's laws-it is blasphemy of the worst kind to say that. Poverty comes from man's injustice to his fellow man.

Leo Tolstoy
Love alone is the only reasonable activity or pursuit of humankind....Fo r Love not only annihilates our fear of meaninglessness but empowers us to seek the happiness of others. And this indeed is our greatest happiness.

Leo Tolstoy
Perhaps it is even more important to know what one should not think about than what one should think about.

Leo Tolstoy
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
The purpose of life is to bring forth goodness. Now, in this life.

Leo Tolstoy
Through the influence of real art, aided by science, guided by religion... peaceful co-operation of man is now obtained by external means - by law courts, police, charitable institutions, factory inspections... It should be obtained by man's free and joyous activity.

Leo Tolstoy
The botanist who finds that the apple falls because the cellular tissue decays and so forth is equally right with the child who stands under the tree and says the apple fell because he wanted to eat it and prayed for it.

Leo Tolstoy
The most important knowledge is that which guides the way you lead your life.

Leo Tolstoy
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
Only by reducing this element of free will to the infinitesimal, that is, by regarding it as an infinitely small quantity, can we convince ourselves of the absolute inaccessibility of the causes, and then instead of seeking causes, history will take the discovery of laws as its problem.

Leo Tolstoy
It seems that it is impossible to live without discovering the purpose of your life. And the first thing which a person should do is to understand the meaning of life. But the majority of people who consider themselves to be educated are proud that they have reached such great height that they cease to care about the meaning of existence.

Leo Tolstoy
Suddenly I heard the words of Christ and understood them, and life and death ceased to seem to me evil, and instead of despair I experienced happiness and the joy of life undisturbed by death.

Leo Tolstoy
A new conception of life cannot be imposed on men; it can only be freely assimilated. And it can only be freely assimilated in two ways: one spiritual and internal, the other experimental and external.

Leo Tolstoy
Why did it happen in this and not in some other way? Because it happened so!

Leo Tolstoy
How important the concept of God is, and how instead of valuing what has been given us, we with light hearts spurn it because of absurdities that have been attached to it.

Leo Tolstoy
Woman, you see, is an object of such a kind that study it as much as you will, it is always quite new.

Leo Tolstoy
What doubt can you have of the Creator when you behold His creation?... Who has decked the heavenly firmament with its stars? Who has clothed the earth in its beauty? How could it be without the creator?

Leo Tolstoy
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
An agile but unintelligent and abnormal German, possessed of the mania of grandeur.

Leo Tolstoy
Work is the inevitable condition of human life, the true source of human welfare.

Leo Tolstoy
The highest wisdom is established, not on reason alone, not on those worldly sciences, physics, history, chemistry, and the like, on which intellectual knowledge stumbles. The highest wisdom is one. The highest wisdom has one science, the science of the All, the universal science which explains all creation, and the place which man occupies in it.

Leo Tolstoy
Slavery results from laws, laws are made by governments, and, therefore people can only be freed from slavery by the abolition of governments.... And it is time for people to understand that governments not only are not necessary, but are harmful and most highly immoral institutions, in which a self-respecting, honest man cannot and must not take part.

Leo Tolstoy
Reason unites us, not only with our contemporaries, but with men who lived two thousand years before us, and with those who will live after us.

Leo Tolstoy
There lay between them, separating them, that same terrible line of the unknown and of fear, like the line separating the living from the dead.

Leo Tolstoy