Top 500 Leo Tolstoy Quotes (2026 Update)
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201. “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

202. “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

203. “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

204. “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

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

— Leo Tolstoy

206. “Woman is generally so bad that the difference between a good and a bad woman scarcely exists.”

— Leo Tolstoy

207. “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

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

— Leo Tolstoy

209. “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

210. “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

211. “Never did Christ utter a single word attesting to a personal resurrection and a life beyond the grave.”

— Leo Tolstoy

212. “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

Featured in: Simplicity Quotes

213. “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

214. “Every heart has its own skeletons.”

— Leo Tolstoy

215. “Rivers are places that renew our spirit, connect us with our past, and link us directly with the flow and rhythm of the natural world.”

— Leo Tolstoy

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

— Leo Tolstoy

217. “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

218. “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

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

— Leo Tolstoy

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

— Leo Tolstoy

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

— Leo Tolstoy

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

— Leo Tolstoy

223. “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

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

— Leo Tolstoy

225. “Power is a word the meaning of which we do not understand.”

— Leo Tolstoy

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

— Leo Tolstoy

227. “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

228. “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

229. “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

Featured in: Reading Quotes

230. “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

231. “The Christian churches and Christianity have nothing in common save in name: they are utterly hostile opposites. The churches are arrogance, violence, usurpation, rigidity, death; Christianity is humility, penitence, submissiveness, progress, life.”

— Leo Tolstoy

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

— Leo Tolstoy

233. “I don’t want to prove anything; I merely want to live, to do no one harm but myself. I have the right to do that, haven’t I?”

— Leo Tolstoy

234. “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

235. “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

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

— Leo Tolstoy

237. “The true office of any faith is to give life a meaning which death cannot destroy.”

— Leo Tolstoy

238. “Our body is a machine for living.”

— Leo Tolstoy

239. “The essence of any religion lies solely in the answer to the question: why do I exist, and what is my relationship to the infinite universe that surrounds me?”

— Leo Tolstoy

240. “Energy is based on love.”

— Leo Tolstoy

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

— Leo Tolstoy

242. “It is by those who have suffered that the world has been advanced.”

— Leo Tolstoy

243. “My life had come to a sudden stop. I was able to breathe, to eat, to drink, to sleep. I could not, indeed help doing so; but there was no real life in me.”

— Leo Tolstoy

Featured in: Real Quotes

244. “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

245. “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

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

— Leo Tolstoy

247. “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

248. “It is possible to live only as long as life intoxicates us; once we are sober we cannot help seeing that it is all a delusion, a stupid delusion.”

— Leo Tolstoy

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

— Leo Tolstoy

250. “Not one word, not one gesture of yours shall I, could I, ever forget...”

— Leo Tolstoy