Top 500 Leo Tolstoy Quotes (2024 Update)
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351. “The life of our class, of the wealthy and the learned, was not only repulsive to me but had lost all meaning. The sum of our action and thinking, of our science and art, all of it struck me as the overindulgences of a spoiled child.”

— Leo Tolstoy

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

— Leo Tolstoy

353. “But that’s just the aim of civilization – to make everything a source of enjoyment.”

— Leo Tolstoy

354. “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

355. “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

356. “We should show life neither as it is or as it ought to be, but only as we see it in our dreams.”

— Leo Tolstoy

357. “God gave the day, God gave the strength.”

— Leo Tolstoy

358. “The ideas of the wise have been tested by centuries. Everything medium is lost and only original, deep and useful things are left.”

— Leo Tolstoy

359. “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

360. “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

361. “Levin scowled. The humiliation of his rejection stung him to the heart, as though it were a fresh wound he had only just received. But he was at home, and at home the very walls are a support.”

— Leo Tolstoy

362. “Giving alms is only a virtuous deed when you give money that you yourself worked to get.”

— Leo Tolstoy

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

— Leo Tolstoy

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

— Leo Tolstoy

365. “The subject of history is the life of peoples and mankind.”

— Leo Tolstoy

366. “The military world is characterized by the absence of freedom – in other words, a rigorous discipline-enforced inactivity, ignorance, cruelty, debauchery and drunkenness.”

— Leo Tolstoy

367. “There are always so many conjectures as to the issue of any event that, whatever the outcome, there will always be people to say: ‘I said then that it would be so’”

— Leo Tolstoy

368. “Good fiction doesn’t come out of the basic conflict of good versus bad. Instead, it comes out of a conflict between good and good.”

— Leo Tolstoy

369. “Power is the relation of a given person to other persons, in which the more this person expresses opinions, theories and justifications of the collective action the less is his participation in that action.”

— Leo Tolstoy

370. “To educate the peasantry, three things are needed: schools, schools and schools.”

— Leo Tolstoy

371. “We are all created to be miserable, and that we all know it, and all invent means of deceiving each other. And when one sees the truth, what is one to do?”

— Leo Tolstoy

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

— Leo Tolstoy

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

— Leo Tolstoy

374. “There is no significant idea which cannot be explained to an intelligent twelve year old boy in fifteen minutes.”

— Leo Tolstoy

375. “There are such repulsive faces in the world.”

— Leo Tolstoy

376. “Before we can study the central issues of life today, we must destroy the prejudices and fallacies born of previous centuries.”

— Leo Tolstoy

377. “Power, from the standpoint of experience, is merely the relation that exists between the expression of someone’s will and the execution of that will by others.”

— Leo Tolstoy

378. “And yet, now that years have passed, I recall it and wonder that it could distress me so much. It will be the same thing, too, with this trouble. Time will go by and I shall not mind about this either.”

— Leo Tolstoy

379. “There can be no peace for us, only misery, and the greatest happiness.”

— Leo Tolstoy

380. “Her face was brilliant and glowing; but this glow was not one of brightness; it suggested the fearful glow of a conflagration in the midst of a dark night.”

— Leo Tolstoy

381. “I simply want to live; to cause no evil to anyone but myself.”

— Leo Tolstoy

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

— Leo Tolstoy

383. “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

384. “Love those you hate you.”

— Leo Tolstoy

385. “Woman is more impressionable than man. Therefore in the Golden Age they were better than men. Now they are worse.”

— Leo Tolstoy

386. “He remembered his mother’s love for him, and his family’s, and his friends’, and the enemy’s intention to kill him seemed impossible.”

— Leo Tolstoy

387. “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

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

— Leo Tolstoy

389. “The difference between real material poison and intellectual poison is that most material poison is disgusting to the taste, but intellectual poison, which takes the form of cheap newspapers or bad books, can unfortunately sometimes be attractive.”

— Leo Tolstoy

390. “Life did not stop, and one had to live.”

— Leo Tolstoy

391. “If there are as many minds as there are men, then there are as many kinds of love as there are hearts.”

— Leo Tolstoy

392. “To get rid of an enemy one must love him.”

— Leo Tolstoy

393. “After the doctor’s departure Koznyshev felt inclined to go to the river with his fishing rod. He was fond of angling, and seemed proud of being able to like such a stupid occupation.”

— Leo Tolstoy

394. “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

395. “In life, in true life, there can be nothing better than what is. Wanting something different than what is, is blasphemy.”

— Leo Tolstoy

396. “Hypocrisy in anything whatever may deceive the cleverest and most penetrating man, but the least wide-awake of children recognizes it, and is revolted by it, however ingeniously it may be disguised.”

— Leo Tolstoy

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

— Leo Tolstoy

398. “Friends we shall never be, you know that yourself. Whether we shall be the happiest or the wretchedest of people – that’s in your hands.”

— Leo Tolstoy

399. “And those who only know the non-platonic love have no need to talk of tragedy. In such love there can be no sort of tragedy.”

— Leo Tolstoy

400. “We walked to meet each other up at the time of our love and then we have been irresistibly drifting in different directions, and there’s no altering that.”

— Leo Tolstoy