Top 500 Leo Tolstoy Quotes (2025 Update)
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401. “There are such repulsive faces in the world.”

— Leo Tolstoy

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

— Leo Tolstoy

403. “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

404. “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

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

— Leo Tolstoy

406. “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

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

— Leo Tolstoy

408. “Love those you hate you.”

— Leo Tolstoy

409. “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

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

— Leo Tolstoy

411. “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

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

— Leo Tolstoy

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

— Leo Tolstoy

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

— Leo Tolstoy

415. “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

416. “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

417. “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

418. “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

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

— Leo Tolstoy

420. “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

421. “Energy rests upon love; and come as it will, there’s no forcing it.”

— Leo Tolstoy

422. “I must have physical exercise, or my temper’ll certainly be ruined.”

— Leo Tolstoy

423. “I’m like a starving man who has been given food. Maybe he’s cold, and his clothes are torn, and he’s ashamed, but he’s not unhappy.”

— Leo Tolstoy

424. “Whenever my life came to a halt, the questions would arise: Why? And what next?”

— Leo Tolstoy

425. “One must be cunning and wicked in this world.”

— Leo Tolstoy

426. “One of the most obtuse superstitions is the superstition of the scientists who say that man can exist without faith.”

— Leo Tolstoy

427. “Art should cause violence to be set aside and it is only art that can accomplish this.”

— Leo Tolstoy

428. “In order to obtain and hold power, a man must love it.”

— Leo Tolstoy

429. “Something magical has happened to me: like a dream when one feels frightened and creepy, and suddenly wakes up to the knowledge that no such terrors exist. I have wakened up.”

— Leo Tolstoy

430. “I often think that men don’t understand what is noble and what is ignorant, though they always talk about it.”

— Leo Tolstoy

431. “Children: a torment and nothing more.”

— Leo Tolstoy

432. “Then he thought himself unhappy, but happiness was all in the future; now he felt that the best happiness was already in the past.”

— Leo Tolstoy

433. “If Mormonism is able to endure, unmodified, until it reaches the third and fourth generation, it is destined to become the greatest power the world has ever known.”

— Leo Tolstoy

434. “Those whom God wishes to destroy he drives mad.”

— Leo Tolstoy

435. “The antagonism between life and conscience may be removed in two ways: by a change of life or by a change of conscience.”

— Leo Tolstoy

436. “This is where the strength of the physician lies, be he a quack, a homeopath or an allopath. He supplies the perennial demand for comfort, the craving for sympathy that every human sufferer feels.”

— Leo Tolstoy

437. “I felt a wish never to leave that room – a wish that dawn might never come, that my present frame of mind might never change.”

— Leo Tolstoy

438. “The appreciation of the merits of art of the emotions it conveys depends upon an understanding of the meaning of life...”

— Leo Tolstoy

439. “At moments of departure and a change of life, people capable of reflecting on their actions usually get into a serious state of mind. At these moments they usually take stock of the past and make plans for the future.”

— Leo Tolstoy

440. “People are always happy where there is love, because their happiness in in themselves.”

— Leo Tolstoy

441. “If once we admit, be it for a single hour or in a single instance, that there can be anything more important than compassion for a fellow human being, then there is no crime against man that we cannot commit with an easy conscience.”

— Leo Tolstoy

442. “He could not be mistaken. There were no other eyes like those in the world. There was only one creature in the world who could concentrate for him all the brightness and meaning of life. It was she. It was Kitty.”

— Leo Tolstoy

443. “Beautiful as seemed mama’s face, it became more lovely when she smiled and seemed to enliven everything about her.”

— Leo Tolstoy

444. “Man must not check reason by tradition, but contrariwise, must check tradition by reason.”

— Leo Tolstoy

445. “I say that the God who created the world in six days and who sent His son, and also his son himself, are not God, but that God is the one existing, incomparable good, the beginning of everything.”

— Leo Tolstoy

446. “The question of how things will settle down is the only important question...”

— Leo Tolstoy

447. “Her maternal instinct told her Natasha had too much of something, and because of this she would not be happy.”

— Leo Tolstoy

448. “And whatever people might say about the time having come when young people must arrange their future for themselves, she could not believe it any more than she could believe that loaded pistols could ever be the best toys for five-year-old children.”

— Leo Tolstoy

449. “Both salvation and punishment for man lie in the fact that if he lives wrongly he can befog himself so as not to see the misery of his position.”

— Leo Tolstoy

450. “Ah, if everyone was as sensitive as you! There’s no girl who hasn’t gone through that. And it’s all so unimportant!”

— Leo Tolstoy