Leo Tolstoy Quotes

509 Sourced Quotes

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
If there was a reason why he preferred the liberal tendency to the conservative one (also held to by many of his circle), it was not because he found the liberal tendency more sensible, but it more closely suited his manner of life.

Leo Tolstoy
In marriage the great thing was love, and that with love one would always be happy, for happiness rests only on oneself.

Leo Tolstoy
And so the liberal tendency became a habit with Stepan Arkadyich, and he liked his newspaper, as he liked a cigar after dinner, for the slight haze it produced in his head.

Leo Tolstoy
Both salvation and punishment for man lie in the fact that if he lives wrongly he can befog himself so as not to see the misery of his position.

Leo Tolstoy
What is called science today consists of a haphazard heap of information, united by nothing, often utterly unnecessary, and not only failing to present one unquestionable truth, but as often as not containing the grossest errors, today put forward as truths, and tomorrow overthrown.

Leo Tolstoy
If they'd told me at college that other people understood the integral calculus, and I didn't, then pride would have come in.

Leo Tolstoy
Power is the relation of a given person to other persons, in which the more this person expresses opinions, theories and justifications of the collective action the less is his participation in that action.

Leo Tolstoy
When it is impossible to stretch the very elastic threads of historical ratiocination any farther, when actions are clearly contrary to all that humanity calls right or even just, the historians produce a saving conception of 'greatness.' 'Greatness,' it seems, excludes the standards of right and wrong. For the 'great' man nothing is wrong, there is no atrocity for which a 'great' man can be blamed.

Leo Tolstoy
We call beauty that which supplies us with a particular pleasure.

Leo Tolstoy
I must have physical exercise, or my temper'll certainly be ruined.

Leo Tolstoy
Science and art are as closely bound together as the lungs and heart, so that if one organ is vitiated the other cannot act rightly.

Leo Tolstoy
Until you do what you believe in, you don't know whether you believe it or not.

Leo Tolstoy
Arriving at infinitesimals, mathematics, the most exact of sciences, abandons the process of analysis and enters on the new process of the integration of unknown, infinitely small, quantities.

Leo Tolstoy
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
School is established, not in order that it should be convenient for the children to study, but that teachers should be able to teach in comfort. The children's conversations, motion, merriment are not convenient for the teacher, and so in the schools, which are built on the plan of prisons, are prohibited.

Leo Tolstoy
No matter when, at whatever moment, if she were asked what she was thinking about she could reply quite correctly - one thing, her happiness and her unhappiness.

Leo Tolstoy
I asked: 'What is the meaning of my life, beyond time, cause, and space?' And I replied to quite another question: 'What is the meaning of my life within time, cause, and space?' With the result that, after long efforts of thought, the answer I reached was: 'None'.

Leo Tolstoy
If it were not so frightening it would be amusing to observe the pride and complacency with which we, like children, take apart the watch, pull out the spring and make a toy of it, and are then surprised when the watch stops working.

Leo Tolstoy
If every man could act as he chose, the whole of history would be a tissue of disconnected accidents.

Leo Tolstoy
And yet, now that years have passed, I recall it and wonder that it could distress me so much. It will be the same thing, too, with this trouble. Time will go by and I shall not mind about this either.

Leo Tolstoy
I say that the God who created the world in six days and who sent His son, and also his son himself, are not God, but that God is the one existing, incomparable good, the beginning of everything.

Leo Tolstoy
Religion reveals the meaning of life, and science only applies this meaning to the course of circumstances.

Leo Tolstoy
The chief attraction of military service has consisted and will consist in this compulsory and irreproachable idleness.

Leo Tolstoy
Loving with human love, one may pass from love to hatred; but divine love cannot change. Nothing, not even death, can shatter it. It is all the very nature of the soul. Love is life. All, all that I understand, I understand only because of love. All is bound up in love alone. Love is God and dying means for me a particle of love, to go back to the universal and eternal source of love.

Leo Tolstoy
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.

Leo Tolstoy
I was now prepared to accept any faith so long as it did not demand a direct denial of reason, which would have been a deceit.

Leo Tolstoy
The struggle with evil by means of violence is the same as an attempt to stop a cloud, in order that there may be no rain.

Leo Tolstoy
The essence of any religion lies solely in the answer to the question: why do I exist, and what is my relationship to the infinite universe that surrounds me?

Leo Tolstoy
And for him, who lived in a certain circle, and who required some mental activity such as usually develops with maturity, having views was as necessary as having a hat.

Leo Tolstoy