Top 500 Leo Tolstoy Quotes (2025 Update)
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101. “If everyone fought for their own convictions there would be no war.”

— Leo Tolstoy

102. “It’s not given to people to judge what’s right or wrong. People have eternally been mistaken and will be mistaken, and in nothing more than in what they consider right and wrong.”

— Leo Tolstoy

103. “Kings are the slaves of history.”

— Leo Tolstoy

104. “Art is not a handicraft, it is the transmission of feeling the artist has experienced.”

— Leo Tolstoy

105. “He never chooses an opinion; he just wears whatever happens to be in style.”

— Leo Tolstoy

106. “One can live magnificently in this world if one knows how to work and how to love.”

— Leo Tolstoy

107. “A holy spirit lives within you.”

— Leo Tolstoy

108. “All the variety, all the charm, all the beauty of life is made up of light and shadow.”

— Leo Tolstoy

109. “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

110. “Seize the moments of happiness, love and be loved! That is the only reality in the world, all else is folly.”

— Leo Tolstoy

111. “Art is a microscope which the artist fixes on the secrets of his soul, and shows to people these secrets which are common to all.”

— Leo Tolstoy

112. “Money is a new form of slavery, and distinguishable from the old simply by the fact that it is impersonal – that there is no human relation between master and slave.”

— Leo Tolstoy

113. “To sin is a human business, to justify sins is a devilish business.”

— Leo Tolstoy

114. “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

115. “The more we live by our intellect, the less we understand the meaning of life.”

— Leo Tolstoy

116. “I wanted movement and not a calm course of existence. I wanted excitement and danger and the chance to sacrifice myself for my love.”

— Leo Tolstoy

117. “Freethinkers are those who are willing to use their minds without prejudice and without fearing to understand things that clash with their own customs, privileges, or beliefs. This state of mind is not common, but it is essential for right thinking...”

— Leo Tolstoy

118. “If, then, I were asked for the most important advice I could give, that which I considered to be the most useful to the men of our century, I should simply say: in the name of God, stop a moment, cease your work, look around you.”

— Leo Tolstoy

119. “The most important person is the one you are with in this moment.”

— Leo Tolstoy

120. “Music is love in search of a voice.”

— Leo Tolstoy

121. “It is not beauty that endears, it’s love that makes us see beauty.”

— Leo Tolstoy

122. “All art has this characteristic-it unites people.”

— Leo Tolstoy

123. “All, everything that I understand, I understand only because I love.”

— Leo Tolstoy

124. “Be bad, but at least don’t be a liar, a deceiver!”

— Leo Tolstoy

125. “There is no greatness where there is no simplicity, goodness and truth.”

— Leo Tolstoy

126. “If you do not know your place in the world and the meaning of your life, you should know there is something to blame; and it is not the social system, or your intellect, but the way in which you have directed your intellect.”

— Leo Tolstoy

127. “Nothing is so necessary for a young man as the company of intelligent women.”

— Leo Tolstoy

128. “By words one transmits thoughts to another, by means of art, one transmits feelings.”

— Leo Tolstoy

129. “Without knowing what I am and why I am here, life is impossible.”

— Leo Tolstoy

130. “Art is the uniting of the subjective with the objective, of nature with reason, of the unconscious with the conscious, and therefore art is the highest means of knowledge.”

— Leo Tolstoy

131. “Why should I live? Why should I do anything? Is there in life any purpose which the inevitable death that awaits me does not undo and destroy?”

— Leo Tolstoy

132. “Once we’re thrown off our habitual paths, we think all is lost, but it’s only here that the new and the good begins.”

— Leo Tolstoy

133. “He in his madness prays for storms, and dreams that storms will bring him peace.”

— Leo Tolstoy

134. “What is important is not the quantity of your knowledge but its quality. You can know many things without knowing the most important.”

— Leo Tolstoy

135. “Anything is better than lies and deceit!”

— Leo Tolstoy

136. “Happiness is pleasure without regret.”

— Leo Tolstoy

137. “People try to do all sorts of clever and difficult things to improve life instead of doing the simplest, easiest thing-refusing to participate in activities that make life bad.”

— Leo Tolstoy

138. “Very often, all the activity of the human mind is directed not in revealing the truth, but in hiding the truth.”

— Leo Tolstoy

139. “Until you do what you believe in, you don’t know whether you believe it or not.”

— Leo Tolstoy

140. “It’s all God’s will: you can die in your sleep, and God can spare you in battle.”

— Leo Tolstoy

141. “Happiness does not depend on outward things, but on the way we see them.”

— Leo Tolstoy

142. “For a few seconds they looked silently into each other’s eyes, and the distant and impossible suddenly became near, possible, and inevitable.”

— Leo Tolstoy

143. “Perhaps it’s because I appreciate all I have so much that I don’t worry about what I haven’t got.”

— Leo Tolstoy

144. “Joy can only be real if people look upon their life as a service and have a definite object in life outside themselves and their personal happiness.”

— Leo Tolstoy

145. “Regard the society of women as a necessary unpleasantness of social life, and avoid it as much as possible.”

— Leo Tolstoy

146. “The whole world is divided for me into two parts: one is she, and there is all happiness, hope, light; the other is where she is not, and there is dejection and darkness...”

— Leo Tolstoy

147. “The most difficult subjects can be explained to the most slow- witted man if he has not formed any idea of them already; but the simplest thing cannot be made clear to the most intelligent man if he is firmly persuaded that he knows already, without a shadow of doubt, what is laid before him.”

— Leo Tolstoy

148. “And where love ends, hate begins.”

— Leo Tolstoy

149. “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

150. “Everything depends on upbringing.”

— Leo Tolstoy