Leo Tolstoy Quotes

The teaching of the church, theoretically astute, is a lie in practice and a compound of vulgar superstitions and sorcery

By Leo Tolstoy

The strongest of all warriors are these two -- Time and Patience.

By Leo Tolstoy

The sole meaning of life is to serve humanity.

By Leo Tolstoy

The more we live by our intellect, the less we understand the meaning of life.

By Leo Tolstoy

The chief difference between words and deeds is that words are always intended for men for their approbation, but deeds can be done only for God.

By Leo Tolstoy

She had wit, she had grace, she had beauty; But above all, she had truth.

By Leo Tolstoy

Pure and complete sorrow is as impossible as pure and complete joy.

By Leo Tolstoy

One ought only to write when one leaves a piece of ones flesh in the ink-pot each time one dips one's pen.

By Leo Tolstoy

Nietzsche was stupid and abnormal.

By Leo Tolstoy

Music is the shorthand of emotion.

By Leo Tolstoy

Joy can be real only if people look on their life as a service, and have a definite object in life outside themselves and their personal happiness.

By Leo Tolstoy

If one has no vanity in this life of ours, there is no sufficient reason for living.

By Leo Tolstoy

I know that most men, including those at ease with problems of the greatest complexity, can seldom accept even the simplest and most obvious truth if it be such as would oblige them to admit the falsity of conclusions which they have delighted in explaining to colleagues, which they have proudly taught to others, and which they have woven, thread by thread, into the fabric of their lives.

By Leo Tolstoy

I know that most men, including those at ease with problems of the greatest complexity, can seldom accept even the simplest and most obvious truth if it be such as would oblige them to admit the falsity of conlusions which they have delighted in explaining to colleages, which they have proudly taught to others, and which they have woven, thread by thread, into the fabric of their lives.

By Leo Tolstoy

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

By Leo Tolstoy

He never chooses an opinion; he just wears whatever happens to be in style.

By Leo Tolstoy

Happy families are all alike every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way.

By Leo Tolstoy

Happy families are all alike; every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way.

By Leo Tolstoy

Everything that I understand, I understand only because I love.

By Leo Tolstoy

Crude, immoral, vulgar and senseless.

By Leo Tolstoy

Conceit is incompatible with understanding.

By Leo Tolstoy

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

By Leo Tolstoy

Art is not a handicraft, it is the transmission of feeling the artist has experienced.

By Leo Tolstoy

And all people live, Not by reason of any care they have for themselves, But by the love for them that is in other people.

By Leo Tolstoy

An agile but unintelligent and abnormal German, possessed of the mania of grandeur

By Leo Tolstoy

All violence consists in some people forcing others, under threat of suffering or death, to do what they do not want to do.

By Leo Tolstoy

All happy families resemble one another, but each unhappy family is unhappy in its own way.

By Leo Tolstoy

A man is like a fraction whose numerator is what he is and whose denominator is what he thinks of himself. The larger the denominator the smaller the fraction.

By Leo Tolstoy

I sit on a man's back, choking him and making him carry me, and yet assure myself and others that I am very sorry for him and wish to ease his lot by all possible means -- except by getting off his back.

By Leo Tolstoy

Everyone thinks of changing the world, but no one thinks of changing himself.

By Leo Tolstoy