In order to get power and retain it, it is necessary to love power; but love of power is not connect...
LEO NIKOLAEVICH TOLSTOY Conceit is incompatible with understanding
LEO NIKOLAEVICH TOLSTOY Boredom: the desire for desires
LEO NIKOLAEVICH TOLSTOY Truth, like gold, is to be obtained not by its growth, but by washing away from it all that is not g...
LEO NIKOLAEVICH TOLSTOY The two most powerful warriors are patience and time.
LEO NIKOLAEVICH TOLSTOY Hypocrisy in anything whatever may deceive the cleverest and most penetrating man, but the least wid...
LEO NIKOLAEVICH TOLSTOY Before we can study the central issues of life today, we must destroy the prejudices and fallacies b...
LEO NIKOLAEVICH TOLSTOY Vengeance is mine, and I will repay.
LEO NIKOLAEVICH TOLSTOY True science investigates and brings to human perception such truths and such knowledge as the peopl...
LEO NIKOLAEVICH TOLSTOY Christianity, with its doctrine of humility, of forgiveness, of love, is incompatible with the state...
LEO NIKOLAEVICH TOLSTOY Music is the shorthand of emotion.
LEO NIKOLAEVICH TOLSTOY Our body is a machine for living. It is organized for that, it is its nature. Let life go on in it u...
LEO NIKOLAEVICH TOLSTOY To sin is a human business, to justify sins is a devilish business.
LEO NIKOLAEVICH TOLSTOY If a man earnestly seeks a righteous life, his first act of abstinence is from animal food.
LEO NIKOLAEVICH TOLSTOY Joy can be real only if people look upon their life as a service, and have a definite object in life...
LEO NIKOLAEVICH TOLSTOY Government is an association of men who do violence to the rest of us.
LEO NIKOLAEVICH TOLSTOY I know that my unity with all people cannot be destroyed by national boundaries and government order...
LEO NIKOLAEVICH TOLSTOY It is amazing how complete is the delusion that beauty is goodness.
LEO NIKOLAEVICH TOLSTOY We lost because we told ourselves we lost
LEO NIKOLAEVICH TOLSTOY You can't imagine what a pleasure this complete laziness is to me: not a thought in my brain- you mi...
LEO NIKOLAEVICH TOLSTOY Historians are like deaf people who go on answering questions that no one has asked them.
LEO NIKOLAEVICH TOLSTOY Arithmetic is being able to count up to twenty without taking off your shoes
LEO NIKOLAEVICH TOLSTOY The religious superstition is encouraged by means of the institution of churches, processions, monum...
LEO NIKOLAEVICH TOLSTOY There is trouble with a wife, but it's even worse with a woman who is not a wife
LEO NIKOLAEVICH TOLSTOY The educated minority, although no longer believing in the existing religious teaching, still preten...
LEO NIKOLAEVICH TOLSTOY A writer is dear and necessary for us only in the measure of which he reveals to us the inner workin...
LEO NIKOLAEVICH TOLSTOY You see, if you take pains and learn in order to get a reward, the work will seem hard; but when you...
LEO NIKOLAEVICH TOLSTOY The anarchists are right in everything; in the negation of the existing order, and in the assertion ...
LEO NIKOLAEVICH TOLSTOY The first glass you drive in like a stake, the second flies like a crake, and after the third they f...
LEO NIKOLAEVICH TOLSTOY He never chooses an opinion; he just wears whatever happens to be in style.
LEO NIKOLAEVICH TOLSTOY The question was a fashionable one, whether a definite line exists between psychological and physiol...
LEO NIKOLAEVICH TOLSTOY It is true, I deny the incomprehensible Trinity, and the fable regarding the fall of man, which is a...
LEO NIKOLAEVICH TOLSTOY What an immense mass of evil must result...from allowing men to assume the right of anticipating wha...
LEO NIKOLAEVICH TOLSTOY The only significance of life consists in helping to establish the kingdom of God; and this can be d...
LEO NIKOLAEVICH TOLSTOY If there existed no external means for dimming their consciences, one-half of the men would at once ...
LEO NIKOLAEVICH TOLSTOY Art is not a handicraft, it is the transmission of feeling the artist has experienced.
LEO NIKOLAEVICH TOLSTOY We have become so accustomed to the religious lie that surrounds us that we do not notice the atroci...
LEO NIKOLAEVICH TOLSTOY Some mathematician has said pleasure lies not in discovering truth, but in seeking it.
LEO NIKOLAEVICH TOLSTOY Don't seek God in temples. He is close to you. He is within you. Only you should surrender to Him an...
LEO NIKOLAEVICH TOLSTOY What a strange illusion it is to suppose that beauty is goodness.
LEO NIKOLAEVICH TOLSTOY I sit on a man's back, choking him and making him carry me, and yet assure myself and others that I ...
LEO NIKOLAEVICH TOLSTOY The law condemns and punishes only actions within certain definite and narrow limits; it thereby jus...
LEO NIKOLAEVICH TOLSTOY There is no greatness where there is not simplicity, goodness, and truth
LEO NIKOLAEVICH TOLSTOY Freethinkers are those who are willing to use their minds without prejudice and without fearing to u...
LEO NIKOLAEVICH TOLSTOY But the peasants -- how do the peasants die?
LEO NIKOLAEVICH TOLSTOY Woman, you see, is an object of such a kind that study it as much as you will, it is always quite ne...
LEO NIKOLAEVICH TOLSTOY All governments are in equal measure good and evil. The best ideal is anarchy.
LEO NIKOLAEVICH TOLSTOY All, everything that I understand, I understand only because I love.
LEO NIKOLAEVICH TOLSTOY All happy families are alike; each unhappy family is unhappy in its own way
LEO NIKOLAEVICH TOLSTOY Everyone thinks of changing the world, but no one thinks of changing himself.
LEO NIKOLAEVICH TOLSTOY If you want to be happy, be.
LEO NIKOLAEVICH TOLSTOY It is not beauty that endears, it's love that makes us see beauty
LEO NIKOLAEVICH TOLSTOY If only it be admitted that art may be unintelligible to any one of sound mind and yet be art, there...
LEO NIKOLAEVICH TOLSTOY Error is the force that welds men together; truth is communicated to men only by deeds of truth.
LEO NIKOLAEVICH TOLSTOY Pure and complete sorrow is as impossible as pure and complete joy.
LEO NIKOLAEVICH TOLSTOY What a strange illusion it is to suppose that beauty is goodness! A beautiful woman utters absurditi...
LEO NIKOLAEVICH TOLSTOY The earth is the general and equal possession of all humanity and therefore cannot be the property o...
LEO NIKOLAEVICH TOLSTOY The means to gain happiness is to throw out from oneself like a spider in all directions an adhesive...
LEO NIKOLAEVICH TOLSTOY Money is a new form of slavery, and distinguishable from the old simply by the fact that it is imper...
LEO NIKOLAEVICH TOLSTOY The essence of all slavery consists in taking the product of another's labor by force. It is immater...
LEO NIKOLAEVICH TOLSTOY He had heard that women often love plain ordinary men, but he did not believe it, because he judged ...
LEO NIKOLAEVICH TOLSTOY History would be an excellent thing if only it were true.
LEO NIKOLAEVICH TOLSTOY The sole meaning of life is to serve humanity.
LEO NIKOLAEVICH TOLSTOY If it is true that there are as many minds as there are heads, then there are as many kinds of love ...
LEO NIKOLAEVICH TOLSTOY What counts in making a happy marriage is not so much how compatible you are, but how you deal with ...
LEO NIKOLAEVICH TOLSTOY The only thing that we know is that we know nothing and that is the highest flight of human wisdom.
LEO NIKOLAEVICH TOLSTOY The vocation of every man and woman is to serve other people.
LEO NIKOLAEVICH TOLSTOY He sends a cross, but He also sends the strength to bear it.
LEO NIKOLAEVICH TOLSTOY The time is fast approaching when to call a man a patriot will be the deepest insult you can offer h...
LEO NIKOLAEVICH TOLSTOY Laws are rules established by men who are in control of organized violence for the non fulfillment o...
LEO NIKOLAEVICH TOLSTOY If one loves, one loves the whole person as he or she is, and not as one might wish them to be.
LEO NIKOLAEVICH TOLSTOY An agile but unintelligent and abnormal German, possessed of the mania of grandeur
LEO NIKOLAEVICH TOLSTOY I have discovered nothing new, I have only perceived what I already knew.
LEO NIKOLAEVICH TOLSTOY I know that most men, including those at ease with problems of thegreatest complexity, can seldom ac...
LEO NIKOLAEVICH TOLSTOY Nietzsche was stupid and abnormal.
LEO NIKOLAEVICH TOLSTOY A peasant dies calmly because he is not a Christian. He performs the rituals as a matter of course, ...
LEO NIKOLAEVICH TOLSTOY War is so unjust and ugly that all who wage it must try to stifle the voice of conscience within the...
LEO NIKOLAEVICH TOLSTOY The Christian churches and Christianity have nothing in common save in name: they are utterly hostil...
LEO NIKOLAEVICH TOLSTOY “Anything is better than lies and deceit!”
LEO NIKOLAEVICH TOLSTOY Life consists in penetrating the unknown, and fashioning our actions in accord with the new knowledg...
LEO NIKOLAEVICH TOLSTOY There are two methods of human activity -- and according to which one of these two kinds of activity...
LEO NIKOLAEVICH TOLSTOY All violence consists in some people forcing others, under threat of suffering or death, to do what ...
LEO NIKOLAEVICH TOLSTOY Pleasure in wealth is a fickle joy
LEO NIKOLAEVICH TOLSTOY The teaching of the church, theoretically astute, is a lie in practice and a compound of vulgar supe...
LEO NIKOLAEVICH TOLSTOY Man lives consciously for himself, but is an unconscious instrument in the attainment of the histori...
LEO NIKOLAEVICH TOLSTOY There was no answer except the usual answer life gives to the most complicated and insoluble questio...
LEO NIKOLAEVICH TOLSTOY Religious superstition consists in the belief that the sacrifices, often of human lives, made to the...
LEO NIKOLAEVICH TOLSTOY Only those live who do good.
LEO NIKOLAEVICH TOLSTOY I am convinced that the teaching of the church is in theory a crafty and evil lie, and in practice a...
LEO NIKOLAEVICH TOLSTOY If there is no higher reason--and there is none--then my own reason must be the supreme judge of my ...
LEO NIKOLAEVICH TOLSTOY The chief difference between words and deeds is that words are always intended for men for their app...
LEO NIKOLAEVICH TOLSTOY Man by violating his own feelings becomes cruel. And how deeply seated in the human heart is the inj...
LEO NIKOLAEVICH TOLSTOY There is one evident, indubitable manifestation of the Divinity, and that is the laws of right which...
LEO NIKOLAEVICH TOLSTOY Happiness does not depend on outward things, but on the way we see them
LEO NIKOLAEVICH TOLSTOY War on the other hand is such a terrible thing, that no man, especially a Christian man, has the rig...
LEO NIKOLAEVICH TOLSTOY In saying that without the power of the state, evil men would rule over the good. It is taken for gr...
LEO NIKOLAEVICH TOLSTOY Why must children die? I have reached the conclusion that the only purpose in the life of every man ...
LEO NIKOLAEVICH TOLSTOY The more is given the less people will work for themselves, and the less they work the more their po...
LEO NIKOLAEVICH TOLSTOY The poet takes the best things out of his life and puts them into his work. Hence his work is beauti...
LEO NIKOLAEVICH TOLSTOY A human can be healthy without killing animals for food. Therefore if he eats meat he participates i...
LEO NIKOLAEVICH TOLSTOY Art is a human activity having for its purpose the transmission to others of the highest and best fe...
LEO NIKOLAEVICH TOLSTOY It is easier to produce ten volumes of philosophical writing than to put one principle into practice
LEO NIKOLAEVICH TOLSTOY It is by those who have suffered that the world has been advanced
LEO NIKOLAEVICH TOLSTOY Faith is the force of life.
LEO NIKOLAEVICH TOLSTOY The life of a small group of people, who live true to their convictions, does more and more certain ...
COUNT LEO NIKOLAEVICH TOLSTOY All happy families resemble one another, each unhappy family is unhappy in its own way.
LEO TOLSTOY The sole meaning of life is to serve humanity.
LEO TOLSTOY Truth, like gold, is to be obtained not by its growth, but by washing away from it all that is not g...
LEO TOLSTOY Nietzsche was stupid and abnormal.
LEO TOLSTOY All violence consists in some people forcing others, under threat of suffering or death, to do what ...
LEO TOLSTOY One of the first conditions of happiness is that the link between Man and Nature shall not be broken...
LEO TOLSTOY Even in the valley of the shadow of death, two and two do not make six.
LEO TOLSTOY He never chooses an opinion; he just wears whatever happens to be in style.
LEO TOLSTOY Our body is a machine for living. It is organized for that, it is its nature. Let life go on in it u...
LEO TOLSTOY Music is the shorthand of emotion.
LEO TOLSTOY True life is lived when tiny changes occur.
LEO TOLSTOY Love is life. All, everything that I understand, I understand only because I love. Everything is, ev...
LEO TOLSTOY All, everything that I understand, I understand only because I love.
LEO TOLSTOY Only those live who do good.
LEO TOLSTOY But the peasants -- how do the peasants die?
LEO TOLSTOY He who has a mistaken idea of life, will always have a mistaken idea of death.
LEO TOLSTOY A writer is dear and necessary for us only in the measure of which he reveals to us the inner workin...
LEO TOLSTOY In quiet and untroubled times it seems to every administrator that it is only by his efforts that th...
LEO TOLSTOY There is one evident, indubitable manifestation of the Divinity, and that is the laws of right which...
LEO TOLSTOY I wanted movement and not a calm course of existence. I wanted excitement and danger and the chance ...
LEO TOLSTOY it's much better to do good in a way that no one knows anything about it.
LEO TOLSTOY True science investigates and brings to human perception such truths and such knowledge as the peopl...
LEO TOLSTOY What is the cause of historical events? Power. What is power? Power is the sum total of wills transf...
LEO TOLSTOY A man is like a fraction whose numerator is what he is and whose denominator is what he thinks of hi...
LEO TOLSTOY The only thing that we know is that we know nothing and that is the highest flight of human wisdom.
LEO TOLSTOY I know that most men, including those at ease with problems of the greatest complexity, can seldom a...
LEO TOLSTOY The hero of my tale, whom I love with all the power of my soul, whom I have tried to portray in all ...
LEO TOLSTOY To say that a work of art is good, but incomprehensible to the majority of men, is the same as sayin...
LEO TOLSTOY The Brahmins say that in their books there are many predictions of times in which it will rain. But ...
LEO TOLSTOY Be bad, but at least don't be a liar, a deceiver!
LEO TOLSTOY The changes in our life must come from the impossibility to live otherwise than according to the dem...
LEO TOLSTOY But that's the whole aim of civilization: to make everything a source of enjoyment.
LEO TOLSTOY I understood, not with my intellect but with my whole being, that no theories of the rationality of ...
LEO TOLSTOY Anything is better than lies and deceit!
LEO TOLSTOY Freethinkers are those who are willing to use their minds without prejudice and without fearing to u...
LEO TOLSTOY If so many men, so many minds, certainly so many hearts, so many kinds of love.
LEO TOLSTOY Rummaging in our souls, we often dig up something that ought to have lain there unnoticed.
LEO TOLSTOY I think... if it is true that
there are as many minds as there
are heads, then there are...
LEO TOLSTOY It's not given to people to judge what's right or wrong. People have eternally been mistaken and wil...
LEO TOLSTOY Wrong does not cease to be wrong because the majority share in it.
LEO TOLSTOY It's hard to love a woman and do anything.
LEO TOLSTOY She had no need to ask why he had come. She knew as certainly as if he had told her that he was here...
LEO TOLSTOY A man can live and be healthy without killing animals for food; therefore, if he eats meat, he parti...
LEO TOLSTOY We can know only that we know nothing. And that is the highest degree of human wisdom.
LEO TOLSTOY Only people who are capable of loving strongly can also suffer great sorrow, but this same necessity...
LEO TOLSTOY A quiet secluded life in the country, with the possibility of being useful to people to whom it is e...
LEO TOLSTOY In the name of God, stop a moment, cease your work, look around you.
LEO TOLSTOY Everyone thinks of changing the world, but no one thinks of changing himself.
LEO TOLSTOY I simply want to live; to cause no evil to anyone but myself.
LEO TOLSTOY Respect was invented to cover the empty place where love should be.
LEO TOLSTOY The best generals I have known were... stupid or absent-minded men. Not only does a good army comman...
LEO TOLSTOY The strongest of all warriors are these two
LEO TOLSTOY I sit on a man's back, choking him and making him carry me, and yet assure myself and others that I ...
LEO TOLSTOY A Frenchman is self-assured because he regards himself personally both in mind and body as irresisti...
LEO TOLSTOY We lost because we told ourselves we lost.
LEO TOLSTOY I am always with myself and it is I who am my tormentor.
LEO TOLSTOY Christianity, with its doctrine of humility, of forgiveness, of love, is incompatible with the state...
LEO TOLSTOY The sobs and tears of joy he had not foreseen rose with such force within him that his whole body sh...
LEO TOLSTOY In historic events, the so-called great men are labels giving names to events, and like labels they ...
LEO TOLSTOY There is no greatness where simplicity, goodness and truth are absent.
LEO TOLSTOY The subject of history is the life of peoples and of humanity. To catch and pin down in words--that ...
LEO TOLSTOY Though it is possible to utter words only with the intention to fulfill the will of God, it is very ...
LEO TOLSTOY What a strange illusion it is to suppose that beauty is goodness.
LEO TOLSTOY He never chooses an opinion, he just wears whatever happens to be in style.
LEO TOLSTOY All happy families are alike, but an unhappy family is unhappy after its own fashion.
LEO TOLSTOY Hypocrisy in anything whatever may deceive the cleverest and most penetrating man, but the least wid...
LEO TOLSTOY Joy can only be real only if people look upon their life as a service, and have a definite object in...
LEO TOLSTOY Which is worse? the wolf who cries before eating the lamb or the wolf who does not.
LEO TOLSTOY I know that most men, including those at ease with problems of the greatest complexity, can seldom a...
LEO TOLSTOY The strongest of all warriors are these two — Time and Patience.
LEO TOLSTOY How can one be well...when one suffers morally?
LEO TOLSTOY The Kingdom of God is within you.. and all beings.
LEO TOLSTOY It seldom happens that a man changes his life through his habitual reasoning. No matter how fully he...
LEO TOLSTOY Happy families are all alike; every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way.
LEO TOLSTOY But every acquisition that is disproportionate to the labor spent on it is dishonest.
LEO TOLSTOY Is it really possible to tell someone else what one feels?
LEO TOLSTOY There is no greatness where there is not simplicity, goodness, and truth.
LEO TOLSTOY The two most powerful warriors are patience and time.
LEO TOLSTOY There is no greatness where there is no simplicity, goodness and truth.
LEO TOLSTOY War is so unjust and ugly that all who wage it must try to stifle the voice of conscience within the...
LEO TOLSTOY The greater the state, the more wrong and cruel its patriotism, and the greater is the sum of suffer...
LEO TOLSTOY It is amazing how complete is the delusion that beauty is goodness.
LEO TOLSTOY Art is not a handicraft, it is the transmission of feeling the artist has experienced.
LEO TOLSTOY Faith is the sense of life, that sense by virtue of which man does not destroy himself, but continue...
LEO TOLSTOY Boredom: the desire for desires.
LEO TOLSTOY If you want to be happy, be.
LEO TOLSTOY Without knowing what I am and why I am here, life is impossible.
LEO TOLSTOY He had never thought the question over clearly, but vaguely imagined that his wife had long suspecte...
LEO TOLSTOY Seize the moments of happiness, love and be loved! That is the only reality in the world, all else i...
LEO TOLSTOY Everything intelligent is so boring.
LEO TOLSTOY I sit on a man's back, choking him and making him carry me, and yet assure myself and others tha...
LEO TOLSTOY Government is an association of men who do violence to the rest of us.
LEO TOLSTOY Man lives consciously for himself, but is an unconscious instrument in the attainment of the histori...
LEO TOLSTOY A man can live and be healthy without killing animals for food; therefore, if he eats meat, he parti...
LEO TOLSTOY The chief difference between words and deeds is that words are always intended for men for their app...
LEO TOLSTOY