Top 500 Leo Tolstoy Quotes (2024 Update)
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151. “From the child of five to myself is but a step. But from the newborn baby to the child of five is an appalling distance.”

— Leo Tolstoy

152. “We lost because we told ourselves we lost.”

— Leo Tolstoy

153. “Religion reveals the meaning of life, and science only applies this meaning to the course of circumstances.”

— Leo Tolstoy

154. “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

155. “Rummaging in our souls, we often dig up something that ought to have lain there unnoticed.”

— Leo Tolstoy

156. “The essence of all slavery consists in taking the product of another’s labor by force. It is immaterial whether this force be founded upon ownership of the slave or ownership of the money that he must get to live.”

— Leo Tolstoy

157. “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

158. “War is so unjust and ugly that all who wage it must try to stifle the voice of conscience within themselves.”

— Leo Tolstoy

159. “Pierre was right when he said that one must believe in the possibility of happiness in order to be happy, and I now believe in it. Let the dead bury the dead, but while I’m alive, I must live and be happy.”

— Leo Tolstoy

160. “You can love a person dear to you with a human love, but an enemy can only be loved with divine love.”

— Leo Tolstoy

161. “Wealth brings a heavy purse; poverty, a light spirit.”

— Leo Tolstoy

162. “Ivan Ilych’s life had been most simple and most ordinary and therefore most terrible.”

— Leo Tolstoy

163. “There can be only one permanent revolution- a moral one: the regeneration of the inner man.”

— Leo Tolstoy

164. “In order to get power and retain it, it is necessary to love power; but love of power is not connected with goodness but with qualities that are the opposite of goodness, such as pride, cunning and cruelty.”

— Leo Tolstoy

165. “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

166. “The recognition of the sanctity of the life of every man is the first and only basis of all morality.”

— Leo Tolstoy

167. “Grow spiritually and help others to do so. It is the meaning of life.”

— Leo Tolstoy

168. “If you see that some aspect of your society is bad, and you want to improve it, there is only one way to do so: you have to improve people. And in order to improve people, you begin with only ONE thing: you can become better yourself.”

— Leo Tolstoy

169. “All the true heroes of history will be forgotten and all the villains will be remembered as heroes.”

— Leo Tolstoy

170. “When ignorance does not know something, it says that what it does not know is stupid.”

— Leo Tolstoy

171. “If I know the way home and am walking along it drunkenly, is it any less the right way because I am staggering from side to side!”

— Leo Tolstoy

172. “My piece of bread only belongs to me when I know that everyone else has a share, and that no one starves while I eat.”

— Leo Tolstoy

173. “Music makes me forget myself, my true condition, it carries me off into another state of being, one that isn’t my own.”

— Leo Tolstoy

174. “All governments are in equal measure good and evil. The best ideal is anarchy.”

— Leo Tolstoy

175. “God knows, but He’s waiting.”

— Leo Tolstoy

176. “We imagine that when we are thrown out of our usual ruts all is lost, but it is only then that what is new and good begins. While there is life there is happiness. There is much, much before us.”

— Leo Tolstoy

177. “Dear Lord, what a madhouse the world is!”

— Leo Tolstoy

178. “And the light by which she had read the book filled with troubles, falsehoods, sorrow, and evil, flared up more brightly than ever before, lighted up for her all that had been in darkness, flickered, began to grow dim, and was quenched forever.”

— Leo Tolstoy

179. “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

180. “Is it really possible to tell someone else what one feels?”

— Leo Tolstoy

181. “There are as many loves as there are hearts.”

— Leo Tolstoy

182. “Go take the mother’s soul, and learn three truths: Learn What dwells in man, What is not given to man, and What men live by. When thou hast learnt these things, thou shalt return to heaven.”

— Leo Tolstoy

183. “Man survives earthquakes, epidemics, the horrors of disease, and all the agonies of the soul, but for all time his tormenting tragedy is, and will be, the tragedy of the bedroom.”

— Leo Tolstoy

184. “Even if the absence of government really did mean anarchy in a negative, disorderly sense – which is from from being the case – even then, no anarchical disorder could be worse than the position to which government has led humanity.”

— Leo Tolstoy

185. “It is within my power either to serve God or not to serve Him. Serving Him, I add to my own good and the good of the whole world. Not serving Him, I forfeit my own good and deprive the world of that good, which was in my power to create.”

— Leo Tolstoy

186. “Much unhappiness has come from things left unsaid.”

— Leo Tolstoy

187. “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

188. “Real wisdom is not the knowledge of everything, but the knowledge of which things in life are necessary, which are less necessary, and which are completely unnecessary to know.”

— Leo Tolstoy

189. “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

190. “Debates conceal rather than reveal the truth. Truth is revealed in solitude.”

— Leo Tolstoy

191. “A leader is the wave pushed ahead by the ship.”

— Leo Tolstoy

192. “Each time of life has its own kind of love.”

— Leo Tolstoy

193. “Patriotism is a survival from barbarous times which must not only be evoked and educated but which must be eradicated by all means – by preaching, persuasion, contempt and ridicule.”

— Leo Tolstoy

194. “Vegetarianism serves as the criterion by which we know that the pursuit of moral perfection on the part of humanity is genuine and sincere.”

— Leo Tolstoy

195. “Christian love comes from the understanding that there is a unity of divine origins in oneself and in other people, and not only in people, but in all living things.”

— Leo Tolstoy

196. “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

197. “War on the other hand is such a terrible thing, that no man, especially a Christian man, has the right to assume the responsibility of starting it.”

— Leo Tolstoy

198. “It is a rude feeling, because it is natural only to people standing on the lowest level of morality, and expecting from other nations such outrages as they themselves are ready to inflict.”

— Leo Tolstoy

199. “A battle is won by him who is firmly resolved to win it.”

— Leo Tolstoy

200. “I’d rather end up wishing I hadn’t than end up wishing I had.”

— Leo Tolstoy