Leo Tolstoy - God Quotes

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The chief difference between words and deeds is that words are always intended for men for their approbation, but deeds can be done only for God.

Leo Tolstoy
I thought: I am perishing of cold and hunger, and here is a man thinking only of how to clothe himself and his wife, and how to get bread for themselves. He cannot help me. When the man saw me he frowned and became still more terrible, and passed me by on the other side. I despaired, but suddenly I heard him coming back. I looked up, and did not recognize the same man: before, I had seen death in his face; but now he was alive, and I recognized in him the presence of God.

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

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 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
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
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
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
At that instant he knew that all his doubts, even the impossibility of believing with his reason, of which he was aware in himself, did not in the least hinder his turning to God. All of that now floated out of his soul like dust. To whom was he to turn if not to Him in whose hands he felt himself, his soul, and his love?

Leo Tolstoy
Wealth is a great sin in the eyes of God. Poverty is a great sin in the eyes of man.

Leo Tolstoy
To love life is to love God. Harder and more blessed than all else is to love this life in one's sufferings, in undeserved sufferings.

Leo Tolstoy
I have now understood that though it seems to men that they live by care for themselves, in truth it is love alone by which they live. He who has love, is in God, and God is in him, for God is love.

Leo Tolstoy
Art is not, as the metaphysicians say, the manifestation of some mysterious Idea of beauty or God; it is not, as the aesthetical physiologists say, [play or] a game in which one releases surplus energy,... not the production of pleasing objects, and is above all, not pleasure itself, but it is the means of union among mankind, joining them in the same feelings, and necessary for the life and progress toward the good of the individual and of humanity.

Leo Tolstoy
Life is everything. Life is God. Everything shifts and moves, and this movement is God. And while there is life, there is delight in the self-awareness of the divinity. To love life is to love God. The hardest and most blissful thing is to love this life in one's suffering, in the guiltlessness of suffering.

Leo Tolstoy
Nowhere nor in anything, except in the assertion of the Church, can we find that God or Christ founded anything like what churchmen understand by the Church.

Leo Tolstoy
Unfortunately not only were the rulers, who were considered supernatural beings, benefited by having the peoples in subjection, but as a result of the belief in, and during the rule of, these pseudodivine beings, ever larger and larger circles of people grouped and established themselves around them, and under an appearance of governing took advantage of the people. And when the old deception of a supernatural and God-appointed authority had dwindled away these men were only concerned to devise a new one which like its predecessor should make it possible to hold the people in bondage to a limited number of rulers.

Leo Tolstoy
It is terrible when people do not know God, but it is worse when people identify as God what is not God.

Leo Tolstoy
The only significance of life consists in helping to establish the kingdom of God; and this can be done only by means of the acknowledgment and profession of the truth by each one of us.

Leo Tolstoy
In the name of God, stop a moment, cease your work, look around you.

Leo Tolstoy
The man is making preparations for a year, and does not know that he will die before evening. And I remembered God's second saying, "Learn what is not given to man."
'What dwells in man" I already knew. Now I learnt what is not given him. It is not given to man to know his own needs.

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
It's all God's will: you can die in your sleep, and God can spare you in battle.

Leo Tolstoy
God forgive me everything!' she said, feeling the impossibility of struggling...

Leo Tolstoy
The sole meaning of life is to serve humanity by contributing to the establishment of the kingdom of God, which can only be done by the recognition and profession of the truth by every man.

Leo Tolstoy
Genuine religion is not about speculating about God or the soul or about what happened in the past or will happen in the future; it cares only about one thing—finding out exactly what should or should not be done in this lifetime.

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
Then I remembered the first lesson God had set me: "Learn what dwells in man." And I understood that in man dwells Love! I was glad that God had already begun to show me what He had promised, and I smiled for the first time.

Leo Tolstoy
Don't seek God in temples. He is close to you. He is within you. Only you should surrender to Him and you will rise above happiness and unhappiness.

Leo Tolstoy
Love hinders death. Love is life. All, everything that I understand, I understand only because I love. Everything is, everything exists, only because I love. Everything is united by it alone. Love is God, and to die means that I, a particle of love, shall return to the general and eternal source.

Leo Tolstoy