Top 500 Leo Tolstoy Quotes (2023 Update)
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201. “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

202. “When we do not love, we sleep, we are children of the dust – but love, and you are a god, you are pure, as on the first day of creation.”

— Leo Tolstoy

203. “For us, with the rule of right and wrong given us by Christ, there is nothing for which we have no standard. And there is no greatness where there is not simplicity, goodness, and truth.”

— Leo Tolstoy

204. “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

205. “Every heart has its own skeletons.”

— Leo Tolstoy

206. “In infinite time, in infinite matter, in infinite space, is formed a bubble organism, and that bubble lasts a while and bursts, and that bubble is Me.”

— Leo Tolstoy

207. “Patriotism is the principle that will justify the training of wholesale murderers.”

— Leo Tolstoy

208. “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

209. “We love people not so much for the good they’ve done us, as for the good we’ve done them.”

— Leo Tolstoy

210. “Work is the inevitable condition of human life, the true source of human welfare.”

— Leo Tolstoy

211. “Violence produces only something resembling justice, but it distances people from the possibility of living justly, without violence.”

— Leo Tolstoy

212. “Man cannot possess anything as long as he fears death. But to him who does not fear it, everything belongs. If there was no suffering, man would not know his limits, would not know himself.”

— Leo Tolstoy

213. “One ought only to write when one leaves a piece of one’s own flesh in the inkpot, each time one dips one’s pen.”

— Leo Tolstoy

214. “Our body is a machine for living. It is organized for that, it is its nature. Let life go on in it unhindered and let it defend itself.”

— Leo Tolstoy

215. “Art is a means of union among men, joining them together in the same feeling.”

— Leo Tolstoy

216. “I must write each day without fail, not so much for the success of the work, as in order not to get out of my routine.”

— Leo Tolstoy

217. “Suddenly I heard the words of Christ and understood them, and life and death ceased to seem to me evil, and instead of despair I experienced happiness and the joy of life undisturbed by death.”

— Leo Tolstoy

218. “One can no more approach people without love than one can approach bees without care. Such is the quality of bees...”

— Leo Tolstoy

219. “When you feel the desire for power, you should stay in solitude for some time.”

— Leo Tolstoy

220. “All the girls in the world were divided into two classes: one class included all the girls in the world except her, and they had all the usual human feelings and were very ordinary girls; while the other class -herself alone- had no weaknesses and was superior to all humanity.”

— Leo Tolstoy

221. “I feel that I am entitled to my share of lightheartedness and there is nothing wrong with enjoying one’s self simply, like a boy.”

— Leo Tolstoy

222. “People jump back and forth in pursuit of pleasures only because they see the emptiness of their lives more clearly than they do the emptiness of whichever new entertainment attracts them.”

— Leo Tolstoy

223. “He had heard that women often love plain ordinary men, but he did not believe it, because he judged by himself and he could only love beautiful mysterious exceptional women.”

— Leo Tolstoy

224. “The vocation of every man and woman is to serve other people.”

— Leo Tolstoy

225. “I have to create a circle of reading for myself: Epictetus, Marcus Aurelius, Lao-Tzu, Buddha, Pascal, The New Testament. This is also necessary for all people.”

— Leo Tolstoy

226. “Division of labor is a justification for sloth.”

— Leo Tolstoy

227. “He soon felt that the fulfillment of his desires gave him only one grain of the mountain of happiness he had expected. This fulfillment showed him the eternal error men make in imagining that their happiness depends on the realization of their desires.”

— Leo Tolstoy

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

— Leo Tolstoy

229. “Do not be sad about what you do not have. Instead, be happy about what you do have. If you will be sad about what you don’t have, you will not be happy about what you do have.”

— Leo Tolstoy

230. “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

231. “He was right in saying that the only certain happiness in life is to live for others.”

— Leo Tolstoy

232. “Which is worse? the wolf who cries before eating the lamb or the wolf who does not.”

— Leo Tolstoy

233. “Death destroys the body, as the scaffolding is destroyed after the building is up and finished. And he whose building is up rejoices at the destruction of the scaffolding and of the body.”

— Leo Tolstoy

234. “Great works of art are only great because they are accessible and comprehensible to everyone.”

— Leo Tolstoy

235. “Woman, you see, is an object of such a kind that study it as much as you will, it is always quite new.”

— Leo Tolstoy

236. “When I have one foot in the grave, I will tell the whole truth about women. I shall tell it, jump into my coffin, pull the lid over me and say, “Do what you like now.””

— Leo Tolstoy

237. “Art is a human activity consisting in this, that one man consciously, by means of certain external signs, hands on to others feelings he has lived through, and that other people are infected by these feelings, and also experience them.”

— Leo Tolstoy

238. “If goodness has causes, it is not goodness; if it has effects, a reward, it is not goodness either. So goodness is outside the chain of cause and effect.”

— Leo Tolstoy

239. “In education, once more, the chief things are equality and freedom.”

— Leo Tolstoy

240. “Everything ends in death, everything. Death is terrible.”

— Leo Tolstoy

241. “The happiness of men consists in life. And life is in labor.”

— Leo Tolstoy

242. “If so many men, so many minds, certainly so many hearts, so many kinds of love.”

— Leo Tolstoy

243. “I have found that a story leaves a deeper impression when it is impossible to tell which side the author is on.”

— Leo Tolstoy

244. “Honest work is much better than a mansion.”

— Leo Tolstoy

245. “In the best, the friendliest and simplest relations flattery or praise is necessary, just as grease is necessary to keep wheels turning.”

— Leo Tolstoy

246. “The epitaph that I would write for history would say: I conceal nothing. It is not enough not to lie. One should strive not to lie in a negative sense by remaining silent.”

— Leo Tolstoy

247. “There will be today, there will be tomorrow, there will be always, and there was yesterday, and there was the day before...”

— Leo Tolstoy

248. “The chief attraction of military service has consisted and will consist in this compulsory and irreproachable idleness.”

— Leo Tolstoy

249. “Condemn me if you choose I do that myself, but condemn me, and not the path which I am following, and which I point out to those who ask me where, in my opinion, the path is.”

— Leo Tolstoy

250. “Writing laws is easy, but governing is difficult.”

— Leo Tolstoy