Leo Tolstoy Quotes (295 Quotes)

Power is the sum total of the wills of the mass, transfered by express or tactic agreement to rulers chosen by the masses.

There lay between them, separating them, that same terrible line of the unknown and of fear, like the line separating the living from the dead.

When one's head is gone one doesn't weep over one's hair!

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

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

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

In order to get power and retain it, it is necessary to love power but love of power is not connected with goodness but with qualities that are the opposite of goodness, such as pride, cunning and cruelty

The anarchists are right in everything in the negation of the existing order, and in the assertion that, without authority, there could not be worse violence than that of authority under existing conditions. They are mistaken only in thinking that a.

Some mathematician has said pleasure lies not in discovering truth, but in seeking it.

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

To sin is a human business, to justify sins is a devilish business.

A Frenchman is self-assured because he regards himself personally both in mind and body as irresistibly attractive to men and women. An Englishman is self-assured as being a citizen of the best-organized state in the world and therefore, as an Englishman, always knows what he should do and knows that all he does as an Englishman is undoubtedly correct. An Italian is self-assured because he is excitable and easily forgets himself and other people. A Russian is self-assured just because he knows nothing and does not want to know anything, since he does not believe that anything can be known. The German's self-assurance is worst of all, stronger and more repulsive than any other, because he imagines that he knows the truth -- science -- which he himself has invented but which is for him the absolute truth.

In quiet and untroubled times it seems to every administrator that it is only by his efforts that the whole population under his rule is kept going, and in this consciousness of being indispensable every administrator finds the chief reward of his labor and efforts. While the sea of history remains calm the ruler-administrator in his frail bark, holding on with a boat hook to the ship of the people and himself moving, naturally imagines that his efforts move the ship he is holding on to. But as soon as a storm arises and the sea begins to heave and the ship to move, such a delusion is no longer possible. The ship moves independently with its own enormous motion, the boat hook no longer reaches the moving vessel, and suddenly the administrator, instead of appearing a ruler and a source of power, becomes an insignificant, useless, feeble man.

It is by those who have suffered that the world has been advanced

Religious superstition consists in the belief that the sacrifices, often of human lives, made to the imaginary being are essential, and that men may and should be brought to that state of mind by all methods, not excluding violence.

If it is true that there are as many minds as there are heads, then there are as many kinds of love as there are hearts.

The Christian churches and Christianity have nothing in common save in name they are utterly hostile opposites. The churches are arrogance, violence, usurpation, rigidity, death Christianity is humility, penitence, submissiveness, progress, life.

All governments are in equal measure good and evil. The best ideal is anarchy.

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

Nietzsche was stupid and abnormal.

There is trouble with a wife, but it's even worse with a woman who is not a wife

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

I am always with myself and it is I who am my tormentor.

The religious superstition is encouraged by means of the institution of churches, processions, monuments, festivities....The so-called clergy stupefy the masses....They befog the people and keep them in an eternal condition of stupefaction

Vengeance is mine, and I will repay.

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

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.

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

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.

True science investigates and brings to human perception such truths and such knowledge as the people of a given time and society consider most important. Art transmits these truths from the region of perception.

Boredom: the desire for desires.

Though it is possible to utter words only with the intention to fulfill the will of God, it is very difficult not to think about the impression which they will produce on men and not to form them accordingly. But deeds you can do quite unknown to men, only for God. And such deeds are the greatest joy that a man can experience.

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.

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.

It is not beauty that endears, it's love that makes us see beauty.

Error is the force that welds men together truth is communicated to men only by deeds of truth.

Man discovers truth by reason only, not by faith.

Music is the shorthand of emotion.

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

Happiness does not depend on outward things, but on the way we see them

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.

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

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

The best generals I have known were... stupid or absent-minded men. Not only does a good army commander not need any special qualities, on the contrary he needs the absence of the highest and best human attributes -- love, poetry, tenderness, and philosophic inquiring doubt. He should be limited, firmly convinced that what he is doing is very important (otherwise he will not have sufficient patience), and only then will he be a brave leader. God forbid that he should be humane, should love, or pity, or think of what is just and unjust.

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.

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.

He had heard that women often love plain ordinary men, but he did not believe it, because he judged by himself and he could only love beautiful mysterious exceptional women.

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.

A peasant dies calmly because he is not a Christian. He performs the rituals as a matter of course, but his true religion is different. His religion is nature, with which he has lived.

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.