Leo Tolstoy Quotes

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456 Quotes on Self-Reflection, Patience, Love, and the Essence of Life

“Though the doctors treated him, let his blood, and gave him medications to drink, he nevertheless recovered.”

“But that's the whole aim of civilization: to make everything a source of enjoyment.”

“Everything ends in death, everything. Death is terrible.”

“We imagine that when we are thrown out of our usual ruts all is lost, but it is only then that what is new and good begins. While there is life there is happiness. There is much, much before us.”

“I can’t think of you and myself apart. You and I are the same to me”

“The only happy marriages I know are arranged ones.”

“And where love ends, hate begins”

“These joys were so trifling as to be as imperceptible as grains of gold among the sand, and in moments of depression she saw nothing but the sand; yet there were brighter moments when she felt nothing but joy, saw nothing but the gold.”

“People of limited intelligence are fond of talking about "these days," imagining that they have discovered and appraised the peculiarities of "these days" and that human nature changes with the times.”

“In order to understand, observe, deduce, man must first be conscious of himself as alive.”

“History would be a wonderful thing – if it were only true.”

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

“He sought his former accustomed fear of death and did not find it. "Where is it? What death?" There was no fear because there was no death.

In place of death there was light.”

“He knew she was there by the joy and fear that overwhelmed his heart.”

“We are all created to be miserable, and that we all know it, and all invent means of deceiving each other. And when one sees the truth, what is one to do?”

“He had the unlucky capacity many men have of seeing and believing in the possibility of goodness and truth, but of seeing the evil and falsehood of life too clearly to take any serious part in it.”

“I ask one thing only: I ask for the right to hope, to suffer as I do. But if even that cannot be, command me to disappear, and I disappear. You shall not see me if my presence is distasteful to you.”

“the very fact of the death of someone close to them aroused in all who heard about it, as always, a feeling of delight that he had died and they hadn't.”

“He did what heroes do after their work is accomplished; he died.”

“Life is too long to say anything definitely; always say perhaps.”

“How often we sin, how much we deceive, and all for what?… All will end in death, all!”

“I did not myself know what I wanted: I feared life, desired to escape from it, yet still hoped something of it.”

“I think that to find out what love is really like, one must first make a mistake and then put it right.”

“The example of a syllogism that he had studied in Kiesewetter's logic: Caius is a man, men are mortal, therefore Caius is mortal, had throughout his whole life seemed to him right only in relation to Caius, but not to him at all.”

“Smiling with pleasure, they went through their memories, not sad, old people's memories, but poetic, youthful ones, those impressions from the very distant past where dream merges with reality, and they laughed softly, rejoicing at something.”

“excuse me' he added, taking the opera glasses out of her hands and looking over her bare shoulder at the row of boxes opposite, 'i'm afraid i'm becoming ridiculous”

“It's like scarlet fever: one has to get it over."

"Then one should invent a way of inoculating love, like vaccination.”

“Art begins when a man, with a purpose of communicating to other people a feeling he once experienced, calls it up again within himself and expresses it by certain external signs.”

“Without the support from religion--remember, we talked about it--no father, using only his own resources, would be able to bring up a child.”

“There was no solution, save that universal solution which life gives to all questions, even the most complex and insolvable: One must live in the needs of the day--that is, forget oneself.”

“Progress consists, not in the increase of truth, but in freeing it from its wrappings. The truth is obtained like gold, not by letting it grow bigger, but by washing off from it everything that isn't gold.”

“I can't praise a young lady who is alive only when people are admiring her, but as soon as she is left alone, collapses and finds nothing to her taste--one who is all for show and has no resources in herself”

“Just think! This whole world of ours is only a speck of mildew sprung up on a tiny planet, yet we think we can have something great - thoughts,, actions! They are all but grains of sand”

“They ought to find out how to vaccinate for love, like smallpox.”

“But our idea is that the wolves should be fed and the sheep kept safe.”

“There is no significant idea which cannot be explained to an intelligent twelve year old boy in fifteen minutes.”

“Death is finished, he said to himself. It is no more!”

“If I know the way home and am walking along it drunkenly, is it any less the right way because I am staggering from side to side!”

“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.”

“A man's every action is inevitably conditioned by what surrounds him and by his own body.”

“Art is not a handicraft; it is the transmission of feeling the artist has experienced.”

“He was right in saying that the only certain happiness in life is to live for others.”

“Time and Patience.”

“… the more he did nothing, the less time he had to do anything.”

“I wanted movement and not a calm course of existence. I wanted excitement and the chance to sacrifice myself for my love. I felt it in myself a superabundance of energy which found no outlet in our quiet life.”

“Rest, nature, books, music…such is my idea of happiness.”

“Everything was made bright by her. She was the smile that shed light all around her.”

“It's not so much that he can't fall in love, but he has not the weakness necessary.”

“but my life now, my whole life apart from anything that can happen to me, every minute of it is no more meaningless, as it was before, but it has the positive meaning of goodness, which I have the power to put into it.”