Quotes By Leo Tolstoy

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

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.

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

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.

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.

War on the other hand is such a terrible thing, that no man, especially a Christian man, has the right to assume the responsibility of starting it.

If so many men, so many minds, certainly so many hearts, so many kinds of love.

The sole meaning of life is to serve humanity.

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.

Boredom: the desire for desires.

The greater the state, the more wrong and cruel its patriotism, and the greater is the sum of suffering upon which its power is founded.

A man can live and be healthy without killing animals for food; therefore, if he eats meat, he participates in taking animal life merely for the sake of his appetite.

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

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

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.

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.

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.

Nietzsche was stupid and abnormal.