Leo Tolstoy Quotes

"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."

"If you want to be happy, be."

"An arrogant person considers himself perfect. This is the chief harm of arrogance. It interferes with a person's main task in life - becoming a better person."

"The two most powerful warriors are patience and time."

"Music is the shorthand of emotion."

"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."

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

"The sole meaning of life is to serve humanity."

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

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

"It is amazing how complete is the delusion that beauty is goodness."

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

"Nietzsche was stupid and abnormal."

"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."

"True life is lived when tiny changes occur."

"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."

"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."

"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."

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

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

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

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

"Joy can only be real if people look upon their life as a service and have a definite object in life outside themselves and their personal happiness."

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

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

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

"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."

"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."