Top 500 Leo Tolstoy Quotes (2025 Update)
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251. “Everything ends in death, everything. Death is terrible.”

— Leo Tolstoy

252. “The most important of all sciences man can and must learn is the science of living so as to do the least evil and the greatest possible good.”

— Leo Tolstoy

253. “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

254. “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

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

— Leo Tolstoy

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

— Leo Tolstoy

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

— Leo Tolstoy

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

— Leo Tolstoy

259. “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

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

— Leo Tolstoy

261. “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

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

— Leo Tolstoy

263. “The soul is immortal- well then, if I shall always live, I must have lived before, lived for a whole eternity.”

— Leo Tolstoy

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

— Leo Tolstoy

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

— Leo Tolstoy

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

— Leo Tolstoy

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

— Leo Tolstoy

268. “Historians are like deaf people who go on answering questions that no one has asked them.”

— Leo Tolstoy

269. “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

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

— Leo Tolstoy

271. “To know God and to live is the same thing. God is Life.”

— Leo Tolstoy

272. “I now understand that my welfare is only possible if I acknowledge my unity with all the people of the world without exception.”

— Leo Tolstoy

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

— Leo Tolstoy

274. “I am sure that nothing has such a decisive influence upon a man’s course as his personal appearance, and not so much his appearance as his belief in its attractiveness or unattractiveness.”

— Leo Tolstoy

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

— Leo Tolstoy

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

— Leo Tolstoy

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

— Leo Tolstoy

278. “The struggle with evil by means of violence is the same as an attempt to stop a cloud, in order that there may be no rain.”

— Leo Tolstoy

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

— Leo Tolstoy

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

— Leo Tolstoy

281. “The true meaning of Christ’s teaching consists in the recognition of love as the supreme law of life, and therefore not admitting any exceptions.”

— Leo Tolstoy

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

— Leo Tolstoy

283. “There is nothing more harmful to you than improving only your material, animal side of life. There is nothing more beneficial, both for you and for others, than activity directed to the improvement of your soul.”

— Leo Tolstoy

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

— Leo Tolstoy

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

— Leo Tolstoy

286. “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

287. “I don’t allow myself to doubt myself even for a moment.”

— Leo Tolstoy

288. “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

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

— Leo Tolstoy

290. “The idea shared by many that life is a vale of tears is just as false as the idea shared by the great majority, the idea to which youth and health and riches incline you, that life is a place of entertainment.”

— Leo Tolstoy

291. “I think that when you remember, remember, remember everything like that, you could go on until you remember what was there before you were in the world.”

— Leo Tolstoy

292. “True science investigates and brings to human perception such truths and such knowledge as the people of a given time and society consider most important. Art transmits these truths from the region of perception to the region of emotion.”

— Leo Tolstoy

293. “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

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

— Leo Tolstoy

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

— Leo Tolstoy

296. “In order to know what he is, a man must first know what the sum of this mysterious humanity is, a humanity made up of people who, like himself, do not understand what they are.”

— Leo Tolstoy

297. “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

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

— Leo Tolstoy

299. “Man recognizes that he will not die, only when he recognizes that he was never born, but always has been, is, and will be.”

— Leo Tolstoy

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

— Leo Tolstoy