Top 500 Leo Tolstoy Quotes (2026 Update)
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301. “We shall all of us die, so why grudge a little trouble?”

— Leo Tolstoy

302. “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

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

— Leo Tolstoy

304. “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

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

— Leo Tolstoy

306. “So he lived, not knowing and not seeing any chance of knowing what he was and for what purpose he had been placed in the word.”

— Leo Tolstoy

307. “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

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308. “Prayer is an invisible tool which is wielded in a visible world.”

— Leo Tolstoy

309. “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

310. “I have discovered nothing new; I have only perceived what I already knew.”

— Leo Tolstoy

311. “We acknowledge God only when we are conscious of His manifestation in us.”

— Leo Tolstoy

312. “He who has love, is in God, and God is in him, for God is love.”

— Leo Tolstoy

313. “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

314. “He who has a mistaken idea of life, will always have a mistaken idea of death.”

— Leo Tolstoy

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

— Leo Tolstoy

316. “Where there is a man who does not labor because another is compelled to work for him, there slavery is.”

— Leo Tolstoy

317. “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

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

— Leo Tolstoy

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

— Leo Tolstoy

320. “Governments not only are not necessary, but are harmful and most highly immoral institutions.”

— Leo Tolstoy

321. “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

322. “Because of the self-confidence with which he had spoken, no one could tell whether what he said was very clever or very stupid.”

— Leo Tolstoy

323. “The idea of beauty is the fundamental idea of everything. In the world we see only distortions of the fundamental idea, but art, by imagination, may lift itself to the height of this idea. Art is therefore akin to creation.”

— Leo Tolstoy

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

— Leo Tolstoy

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

— Leo Tolstoy

326. “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

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

— Leo Tolstoy

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

— Leo Tolstoy

329. “Though the doctors treated him, let his blood, and gave him medications to drink, he nevertheless recovered.”

— Leo Tolstoy

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

— Leo Tolstoy

331. “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

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

— Leo Tolstoy

333. “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

334. “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

335. “By patriotism is meant, not only spontaneous, instinctive love for one’s own nation, and preference for it above all other nations, but also the belief that such love and preference are good and useful.”

— Leo Tolstoy

336. “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

337. “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

338. “I am always with myself, and it is I who am my tormentor.”

— Leo Tolstoy

339. “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

340. “No one is satisfied with his position, but every one is satisfied with his wit.”

— Leo Tolstoy

341. “I ask one thing only: I ask for the right to hope, to suffer as I do. But if even that cannot be, command me to disappear, and I disappear. You shall not see me if my presence is distasteful to you.”

— Leo Tolstoy

342. “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

343. “The changes in our life must come from the impossibility to live otherwise than according to the demands of our conscience not from our mental resolution to try a new form of life.”

— Leo Tolstoy

344. “Pretence about anything sometimes deceives the wisest and shrewdest man, but, however cunningly it is hidden, a child of the meanest capacity feels it and is repelled by it.”

— Leo Tolstoy

345. “You will die and it will all be over. You will die and find out everything or cease asking.”

— Leo Tolstoy

346. “If it were not so frightening it would be amusing to observe the pride and complacency with which we, like children, take apart the watch, pull out the spring and make a toy of it, and are then surprised when the watch stops working.”

— Leo Tolstoy

347. “Sometimes she did not know what she feared, what she desired: whether she feared or desired what had been or what would be, and precisely what she desired, she did not know.”

— Leo Tolstoy

348. “A monkey was carrying two handfuls of peas. One little pea dropped out. He tried to pick it up, and split twenty. He tried to pick up the twenty, and split them all. Then he lost his temper, scattered the peas in all directions and ran away.”

— Leo Tolstoy

349. “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

350. “The example of a syllogism that he had studied in Kiesewetter’s logic: Caius is a man, men are mortal, therefore Caius is mortal, had throughout his whole life seemed to him right only in relation to Caius, but not to him at all.”

— Leo Tolstoy