Leo Tolstoy Quotes

509 Sourced Quotes

You see, if you take pains and learn in order to get a reward, the work will seem hard; but when you work... if you love your work, you will find your reward in that.

Leo Tolstoy
People are always happy where there is love, because their happiness in in themselves.

Leo Tolstoy
I began to realize that the most profound wisdom of man was rooted in the answers given by faith and that I did not have the right to deny them on the grounds of reason; above all, I realized that these answers alone can form a reply to the question of life.

Leo Tolstoy
I now understand that my welfare is only possible if I acknowledge my unity with all the people of the world without exception.

Leo Tolstoy
The soul is immortal- well then, if I shall always live, I must have lived before, lived for a whole eternity.

Leo Tolstoy
God cannot be understood by logical reasoning but only by submission.

Leo Tolstoy
I did not myself know what I wanted: I feared life, desired to escape from it, yet still hoped something of it.

Leo Tolstoy
The higher a man's conception of God, the better will he know Him. And the better he knows God, the nearer will he draw to Him.

Leo Tolstoy
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.

Leo Tolstoy
And so he who looks down at his feet will not know the truth, but he who discerns by the sun which way to go.

Leo Tolstoy
"Mathematics are most important, madam! I don't want to have you like our silly ladies. Get used to it and you'll like it," and he patted her cheek. "It will drive all the nonsense out of your head."

Leo Tolstoy
There is nothing more harmful to you than improving only your material, animal side of life. There is nothing more beneficial, both for you and for others, than activity directed to the improvement of your soul.

Leo Tolstoy
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
There are many faiths, but the spirit is one, in me, in you, and in every man.

Leo Tolstoy
Power, from the standpoint of experience, is merely the relation that exists between the expression of someone's will and the execution of that will by others.

Leo Tolstoy
This bright comet which, having traveled in its orbit with inconceivable velocity through immeasurable space, seemed suddenly — like an arrow piercing the earth — to remain fixed in a chosen spot, vigorously holding its tail erect, shining and displaying its white light amid countless other scintillating stars.

Leo Tolstoy
The actions of men are subject to general immutable laws expressed in statistics.

Leo Tolstoy
Prayer is addressed to the personal God, not because he is personal indeed, I know for certain that he is not personal, because personality is limitation, while God is unlimited.

Leo Tolstoy
Man has received direct 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
Always the same. Now a spark of hope flashes up, then a sea of despair rages, and always pain; always pain, always despair, and always the same.

Leo Tolstoy
Every reform by violence is to be deprecated, because it does little to correct the evil while men remain as they are, and because wisdom has no need of violence.

Leo Tolstoy
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
And that which yesterday was the novel opinion of one man, to-day becomes the general opinion of the majority.

Leo Tolstoy
And so to imagine the action of a man entirely subject to the law of inevitability without any freedom, we must assume the knowledge of an infinite number of space relations, an infinitely long period of time, and an infinite series of causes.

Leo Tolstoy
Better to know a few things which are good and necessary than many things which are useless and mediocre

Leo Tolstoy
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
Religions are the exponents of the highest comprehension of life... within a given age in a given society... a basis for evaluating human sentiments. If feelings bring people nearer to the religion's ideal... they are good; if these estrange them from it, and oppose it, they are bad.

Leo Tolstoy
Time is an illusion in life; the life of the past and the future clouds men from the true life of the present.

Leo Tolstoy
True human life does not take place in time but always "is" at the "timeless" point where the past becomes the future - a point which we incorrectly label the present. This is a timeless point, and people are free only at this point.

Leo Tolstoy