Top 500 Leo Tolstoy Quotes (2023 Update)
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251. “I’m getting old, that’s the thing! What’s in me now won’t be there anymore.”

— Leo Tolstoy

252. “Wealth is a great sin in the eyes of God. Poverty is a great sin in the eyes of man.”

— Leo Tolstoy

253. “Without Greek studies there is no education.”

— Leo Tolstoy

254. “In difficult circumstances always act on first impressions.”

— Leo Tolstoy

255. “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

256. “I believe in one, incomprehensible God, the immortality of the soul and eternal retribution for our acts.”

— Leo Tolstoy

257. “When joy disappears, look for your mistake.”

— Leo Tolstoy

258. “Like all mad men, I thought everyone was mad except myself...”

— Leo Tolstoy

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

— Leo Tolstoy

260. “Human love serves to love those dear to us but to love one’s enemies we need divine love.”

— Leo Tolstoy

261. “Instead of going to Paris to attend lectures, go to the public library, and you won’t come out for twenty years, if you really wish to learn.”

— Leo Tolstoy

262. “We must not only cease our present desire for the growth of the state, but we must desire its decrease, its weakening.”

— Leo Tolstoy

263. “To say that a work of art is good, but incomprehensible to the majority of men, is the same as saying of some kind of food that it is very good but that most people can’t eat it.”

— Leo Tolstoy

264. “The earth is the general and equal possession of all humanity and therefore cannot be the property of individuals.”

— Leo Tolstoy

265. “All violence consists in some people forcing others, under threat of suffering or death, to do what they do not want to do.”

— Leo Tolstoy

266. “Faith is the sense of life, that sense by virtue of which man does not destroy himself, but continues to live on. It is the force whereby we live.”

— Leo Tolstoy

267. “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

268. “History is the product of vast, amorphous and indecipherable social movements.”

— Leo Tolstoy

269. “A man’s every action is inevitably conditioned by what surrounds him and by his own body.”

— Leo Tolstoy

270. “In spite the mountains of books written about art, no precise definition of art has been constructed. And the reason for this is that the conception of art has been based on the conception of beauty.”

— Leo Tolstoy

271. “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

272. “The more is given the less the people will work for themselves, and the less they work the more their poverty will increase.”

— Leo Tolstoy

273. “Every reform by violence is to be deprecated, because it does little to correct the evil while men remain as they are, and because wisdom has no need of violence.”

— Leo Tolstoy

274. “Energy is based on love.”

— Leo Tolstoy

275. “To speak of it would be giving importance to something that has none.”

— Leo Tolstoy

276. “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

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

— Leo Tolstoy

278. “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

279. “India, which is the nursery of the great faiths of the world.”

— Leo Tolstoy

280. “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

281. “She had no need to ask why he had come. She knew as certainly as if he had told her that he was here to be where she was.”

— Leo Tolstoy

282. “The pleasure lies not in discovering truth, but in searching for it.”

— Leo Tolstoy

283. “Better to know a few things which are good and necessary than many things which are useless and mediocre.”

— Leo Tolstoy

284. “Prayer is addressed to the personal God, not because he is personal indeed, I know for certain that he is not personal, because personality is limitation, while God is unlimited.”

— Leo Tolstoy

285. “I prefer a good pair of boots to Shakespeare.”

— Leo Tolstoy

286. “The business of art lies just in this, – to make that understood and felt which, in the form of an argument, might be incomprehensible and inaccessible.”

— Leo Tolstoy

287. “Smiling with pleasure, they went through their memories, not sad, old people’s memories, but poetic, youthful ones, those impressions from the very distant past where dream merges with reality, and they laughed softly, rejoicing at something.”

— Leo Tolstoy

288. “A Gentleman is a man who will pay his gambling debts even when he knows he has been cheated.”

— Leo Tolstoy

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

— Leo Tolstoy

290. “Christianity in its true sense puts an end to the State. It was so understood from its very beginning, and for that Christ was crucified.”

— Leo Tolstoy

291. “In order to obtain and hold power a man must love it. Thus the effort to get it is not likely to be coupled with goodness, but with the opposite qualities of pride, craft and cruelty.”

— Leo Tolstoy

292. “The law condemns and punishes only actions within certain definite and narrow limits; it thereby justifies, in a way, all similar actions that lie outside those limits.”

— Leo Tolstoy

293. “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

294. “Konstantin Levin did not like talking and hearing about the beauty of nature. Words for him took away the beauty of what he saw.”

— Leo Tolstoy

295. “Muhammad has always been standing higher than the Christianity. He does not consider god as a human being and never makes himself equal to God. Muslims worship nothing except God and Muhammad is his Messenger. There is no any mystery and secret in it.”

— Leo Tolstoy

296. “The one who is happy, that’s the one who is right.”

— Leo Tolstoy

297. “He looked at her as a man might look at a faded flower he had plucked, in which it was difficult for him to trace the beauty that had made him pick and so destroy it.”

— Leo Tolstoy

298. “Don’t seek God in temples. He is close to you. He is within you. Only you should surrender to Him and you will rise above happiness and unhappiness.”

— Leo Tolstoy

299. “Christianity, with its doctrine of humility, of forgiveness, of love, is incompatible with the state, with its haughtiness, its violence, its punishment, its wars.”

— Leo Tolstoy

300. “They’ve got no idea what happiness is, they don’t know that without this love there is no happiness or unhappiness for us – there is no life.”

— Leo Tolstoy