Quotes 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.

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.

Man lives consciously for himself, but is an unconscious instrument in the attainment of the historic, universal, aims of humanity.

In all history there is no war which was not hatched by the governments, the governments alone, independent of the interests of the people, to whom war is always pernicious even when successful.

Music is the shorthand of emotion.

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.

True life is lived when tiny changes occur.

There is no greatness where there is no simplicity, goodness and truth.

If there existed no external means for dimming their consciences, one-half of the men would at once shoot themselves, because to live contrary to one's reason is a most intolerable state, and all men of our time are in such a state.

The two most powerful warriors are patience and time.

All, everything that I understand, I understand only because I love.

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

If you want to be happy, be.

Truth, like gold, is to be obtained not by its growth, but by washing away from it all that is not gold.

To say that a work of art is good, but incomprehensible to the majority of men, is the same as saying of some kind of food that it is very good but that most people can't eat it.

Boredom: the desire for desires.

Our body is a machine for living. It is organized for that, it is its nature. Let life go on in it unhindered and let it defend itself.

Without knowing what I am and why I am here, life is impossible.

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

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.

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.

War is so unjust and ugly that all who wage it must try to stifle the voice of conscience within themselves.

Government is an association of men who do violence to the rest of us.

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

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

We must not only cease our present desire for the growth of the state, but we must desire its decrease, its weakening.

In the name of God, stop a moment, cease your work, look around you.

Nietzsche was stupid and abnormal.

One of the first conditions of happiness is that the link between Man and Nature shall not be broken.

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.