Leo Tolstoy Quotes

509 Sourced Quotes

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

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

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

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

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

Leo Tolstoy