Leo Tolstoy Quotes

509 Sourced Quotes

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

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
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
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
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
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
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
Three days afterwards the little princess was buried, and Prince Andrey went to the steps of the tomb to take his last farewell of her. Even in the coffin the face was the same, though the eyes were closed. "Ah, what have you done to me?" it still seemed to say.

Leo Tolstoy
Nothing prevents our denying life by suicide. well then, kill yourself, and you won't discuss. If life displeases you, kill yourself! You live, and cannot understand the meaning of life - then finish it, and do not fool about in life, saying and writing that you do not understand it. You have come into good company where people are contented and know what they are doing; if you find it dull and repulsive - go away!

Leo Tolstoy
In former times the chief method of justifying the use of violence and thereby infringing the law of love was by claiming a divine right for the rulers: the Tsars, Sultans, Rajahs, Shahs and other heads of states.

Leo Tolstoy
Woman is generally so bad that the difference between a good and a bad woman scarcely exists.

Leo Tolstoy
The role of the disappointed lover of a maiden or of any single woman might be ridiculous; but the role of a man who was pursuing a married woman, and who made it the purpose of his life at all cost to draw her into adultery, was one which had in it something beautiful and dignified and could never be ridiculous.

Leo Tolstoy
My principal sin is doubt. I doubt everything, and am in doubt most of the time.

Leo Tolstoy
The vocation of every man and woman is to serve other people.

Leo Tolstoy
The most important person is the one you are with in this moment.

Leo Tolstoy
The relation of word to thought, and the creation of new concepts is a complex, delicate and enigmatic process unfolding in our soul.

Leo Tolstoy
In historical events great men — so-called — are but labels serving to give a name to the event, and like labels they have the least possible connection with the event itself. Every action of theirs, that seems to them an act of their own free will, is in an historical sense not free at all, but in bondage to the whole course of previous history, and predestined from all eternity.

Leo Tolstoy
If a man does not work at necessary and good things, then he will work at unnecessary and stupid things

Leo Tolstoy
History is the life of nations and of humanity. To seize and put into words, to describe directly the life of humanity or even of a single nation, appears impossible.

Leo Tolstoy
A commercial company enslaved a nation comprising two hundred millions. Tell this to a man free from superstition and he will fail to grasp what these words mean. What does it mean that thirty thousand men, not athletes but rather weak and ordinary people, have subdued two hundred million vigorous, clever, capable, and freedom-loving people? Do not the figures make it clear that it is not the English who have enslaved the Indians, but the Indians who have enslaved themselves?

Leo Tolstoy
When a person is haughty, he distances himself from other people and thereby deprives himself of one of life's biggest pleasures—open, joyful communication with everyone.

Leo Tolstoy
I know that most men — not only those considered clever, but even those who are very clever and capable of understanding most difficult scientific, mathematical, or philosophic, problems — can seldom discern even the simplest and most obvious truth if it be such as obliges them to admit the falsity of conclusions they have formed, perhaps with much difficulty — conclusions of which they are proud, which they have taught to others, and on which they have built their lives.

Leo Tolstoy
He felt now that he was not simply close to her, but that he did not know where he ended and she began.

Leo Tolstoy
People usually think that progress consists in the increase of knowledge, in the improvement of life, but that isn't so. Progress consists only in the greater clarification of answers to the basic questions of life. The truth is always accessible to a man. It can't be otherwise, because a man's soul is a divine spark, the truth itself. It's only a matter of removing from this divine spark (the truth) everything that obscures it. Progress consists, not in the increase of truth, but in freeing it from its wrappings. The truth is obtained like gold, not by letting it grow bigger, but by washing off from it everything that isn't gold.

Leo Tolstoy