Top 500 Leo Tolstoy Quotes (2024 Update)
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251. “In education, once more, the chief things are equality and freedom.”

— Leo Tolstoy

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

— Leo Tolstoy

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

— Leo Tolstoy

254. “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

255. “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

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

— Leo Tolstoy

257. “The purpose of life is to bring forth goodness. Now, in this life.”

— Leo Tolstoy

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

— Leo Tolstoy

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

— Leo Tolstoy

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

— Leo Tolstoy

261. “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

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

— Leo Tolstoy

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

— Leo Tolstoy

264. “I’m getting old, that’s the thing! What’s in me now won’t be there anymore.”

— Leo Tolstoy

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

— Leo Tolstoy

266. “There’s a way out of every situation.”

— Leo Tolstoy

267. “The only significance of life consists in helping to establish the kingdom of God.”

— Leo Tolstoy

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

— Leo Tolstoy

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

— Leo Tolstoy

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

— Leo Tolstoy

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

— Leo Tolstoy

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

— Leo Tolstoy

273. “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

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

— Leo Tolstoy

275. “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

276. “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

277. “We shall all of us die, so why grudge a little trouble?”

— Leo Tolstoy

278. “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

279. “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

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

— Leo Tolstoy

281. “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

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

— Leo Tolstoy

283. “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

284. “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

285. “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

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

— Leo Tolstoy

287. “Energy is based on love.”

— Leo Tolstoy

288. “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

289. “But our idea is that the wolves should be fed and the sheep kept safe.”

— Leo Tolstoy

290. “If you love me as you say you do,? she whispered, ’make it so that I am at peace.”

— Leo Tolstoy

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

— Leo Tolstoy

292. “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

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

— Leo Tolstoy

294. “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

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

— Leo Tolstoy

296. “Even in the valley of the shadow of death, two and two do not make six.”

— Leo Tolstoy

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

— Leo Tolstoy

298. “But the peasants – how do the peasants die?”

— Leo Tolstoy

299. “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

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

— Leo Tolstoy