Top 500 Leo Tolstoy Quotes (2025 Update)
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401. “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

402. “With friends, one is well; but at home, one is better.”

— Leo Tolstoy

403. “And the angel said – “I have learned that every man lives not through care of himself, but by love”...”

— Leo Tolstoy

404. “Progress consists only in the greater clarification of answers to the basic questions of life.”

— Leo Tolstoy

405. “And not only the pride of intellect, but the stupidity of intellect. And, above all, the dishonesty, yes, the dishonesty of intellect. Yes, indeed, the dishonesty and trickery of intellect.”

— Leo Tolstoy

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

— Leo Tolstoy

407. “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

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

— Leo Tolstoy

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

— Leo Tolstoy

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

— Leo Tolstoy

411. “God is that infinite All of which man knows himself to be a finite part.”

— Leo Tolstoy

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

— Leo Tolstoy

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

— Leo Tolstoy

414. “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

415. “Do not resist the evil-doer and take no part in doing so, either in the violent deeds of the administration, in the law courts, the collection of taxes, or above all in soldiering, and no one in the world will be able to enslave you.”

— Leo Tolstoy

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

— Leo Tolstoy

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

— Leo Tolstoy

418. “It may be suggested by some books that it is not a sin to kill an animal, but it is written in our own hearts – more clearly than in any book – that we should take pity on animals in the same way as we do on humans.”

— Leo Tolstoy

419. “Man’s mind cannot grasp the causes of events in their completeness, but the desire to find the causes is implanted in man’s soul.”

— Leo Tolstoy

420. “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

421. “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

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

— Leo Tolstoy

423. “I feel not only that I cannot disappear, as nothing disappears in the world, but that I will always be and have always been. I feel that, besides me, above me, spirits live, and that in this world there is truth.”

— Leo Tolstoy

424. “People involve themselves in countless activities which they consider to be important, but they forget about one activity which is more important and necessary than any other, and which includes all other things: the improvement of their soul.”

— Leo Tolstoy

425. “To regard Christ as God, and to pray to him, are to my mind the greatest possible sacrilege.”

— Leo Tolstoy

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

— Leo Tolstoy

427. “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

428. “He was afraid of defiling the love which filled his soul.”

— Leo Tolstoy

429. “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

430. “War is not a polite recreation but the vilest thing in life, and we ought to understand that and not play at war.”

— Leo Tolstoy

431. “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

432. “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

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

— Leo Tolstoy

434. “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

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

— Leo Tolstoy

436. “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

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

— Leo Tolstoy

438. “I can’t think of you and myself apart. You and I are the same to me.”

— Leo Tolstoy

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

— Leo Tolstoy

440. “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

441. “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

442. “If religion is the establishing of a relationship between man and the universe, then morality is the explanation of those activities that automatically result when a person maintains a relationship to the universe.”

— Leo Tolstoy

443. “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

444. “The higher a man’s conception of God, the better will he know Him. And the better he knows God, the nearer will he draw to Him.”

— Leo Tolstoy

445. “When one’s head is gone one doesn’t weep over one’s hair!”

— Leo Tolstoy

446. “If the thought ever comes to you that everything that you have thought about God is mistaken and that there is no God, do not be dismayed. It happens to many people. But do not think that the source of your unbelief is that there is no God.”

— Leo Tolstoy

447. “I can’t understand how anyone can write without rewriting everything over and over again.”

— Leo Tolstoy

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

— Leo Tolstoy

449. “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

450. “Teach French and unteach sincerity.”

— Leo Tolstoy