Leo Tolstoy - Live Quotes

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When the woman showed her love for the children that were not her own, and wept over them, I saw in her the living God, and understood What men live by.

Leo Tolstoy
Just when the question of how to live had become clearer to him, a new insoluble problem presented itself - Death.

Leo Tolstoy
I simply want to live; to cause no evil to anyone but myself.

Leo Tolstoy
Each man lives for himself, uses his freedom to achieve his personal goals, and feels with his whole being that right now he can or cannot do such-and-such an action; but as soon as he does it, this action, committed at a certain moment in time, becomes irreversible, and makes itself the property of history, in which is has not a free but a predestined significance.

Leo Tolstoy
A man can live and be healthy without killing animals for food; therefore, if he eats meat, he participates in taking animal life merely for the sake of his appetite. And to act so is immoral.

Leo Tolstoy
He was right in saying that the only certain happiness in life is to live for others.

Leo Tolstoy
We live in this world like a child who enters a room where a clever person is speaking. The child did not hear the beginning of the speech, and he leaves before the end; and there are certain things which he hears but does not understand

Leo Tolstoy
One can live splendidly in the world, if one can work and love, work for that which one loves, and love that at which one works.

Leo Tolstoy
A person who has spoiled his stomach will criticize his meal saying that the food is bad; the same thing happens with people who are not satisfied with their lives

Leo Tolstoy
All our problems are caused by forgetting what lives within us, and we sell our souls for the bowl of stew of bodily satisfactions.

Leo Tolstoy
If he be really and seriously seeking to live a good life, the first thing from which he will abstain will always be the use of animal food, because...its use is simply immoral, as it involves the performance of an act which is contrary to the moral feeling - killing.

Leo Tolstoy
Science is meaningless because it gives no answer to our question, the only question important for us: 'what shall we do and how shall we live

Leo Tolstoy
What is bad? What is good? What should one love, what hate? Why live, and what am I? What is lie, what is death? What power rules over everything?" he asked himself. And there was no answer to any of these questions except one, which was not logical and was not at all an answer to these questions. This answer was: "You will die—and everything will end. You will die and learn everything—or stop asking.

Leo Tolstoy
So long as people do not consider all men as their brothers and do not consider human life as the most sacred thing, which rather than destroy they must consider it their first and foremost duty to support; that is so long as people do not behave towards one another in a religious manner, they will always ruin one another's lives for the sake of personal gain.

Leo Tolstoy
No one has yet added up all the heavy, stress-filled workdays as well as the hundreds, perhaps thousands, of lives that are wasted to produce the world's amusements. It is for this reason that amusements are not so amusing.

Leo Tolstoy
The unhappiness of our life; patch up our false way of life as we will, propping it up by the aid of the sciences and arts - that life becomes feebler, sicklier, and more tormenting every year; every year the number of suicides and the avoidance of motherhood increases; every year the people of that class become feebler; every year we feel the increasing gloom of our lives. Evidently salvation is not to be found by increasing the comforts and pleasures of life, medical treatments, artificial teeth and hair, breathing exercises, massage, and so forth;... It is impossible to remedy this by any amusements, comforts, or powders - it can only be remedied by a change of life.

Leo Tolstoy
There is only one enduring happiness in life—to live for others.

Leo Tolstoy
Our whole life is taken up with anxiety for personal security, with preparations for living, so that we really never live at all.

Leo Tolstoy
Memento mori—remember death! These are important words. If we kept in mind that we will soon inevitably die, our lives would be completely different. If a person knows that he will die in a half hour, he certainly will not bother doing trivial, stupid, or, especially, bad things during this half hour. Perhaps you have half a century before you die—what makes this any different from a half hour?

Leo Tolstoy