113 Leo Tolstoy Quotes: Wisdom, Love & War

Leo Tolstoy Quotes on Wisdom and Life

From the battlefields of War and Peace to the drawing rooms of Anna Karenina, these leo tolstoy quotes on wisdom gather the Russian master’s deepest lines on how to live, think, and see the world clearly.

1. All happy families are alike; each unhappy family is unhappy in its own way. — Leo Tolstoy
2. We can know only that we know nothing. And that is the highest degree of human wisdom. — Leo Tolstoy
3. The two most powerful warriors are patience and time. — Leo Tolstoy
4. It’s not given to people to judge what’s right or wrong. People have eternally been mistaken and will be, and in nothing more than in what they consider right and wrong. — Leo Tolstoy
5. Pure and complete sorrow is as impossible as pure and complete joy. — Leo Tolstoy
6. 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. — Leo Tolstoy
7. Life did not stop, and one had to live. — Leo Tolstoy
8. A man on a thousand-mile walk has to forget his goal and say to himself every morning, ‘Today I’m going to cover twenty-five miles and then rest and sleep.’ — Leo Tolstoy
9. Historians are like deaf people who go on answering questions that no one has asked them. — Leo Tolstoy
10. In the best, the friendliest and simplest relations, flattery or praise is necessary, just as grease is necessary to keep wheels turning. — Leo Tolstoy
11. 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. — Leo Tolstoy
12. Man cannot possess anything as long as he fears death. But to him who does not fear it, everything belongs. — Leo Tolstoy
13. There are no conditions to which a person cannot grow accustomed, especially if he sees that everyone around him lives in the same way. — Leo Tolstoy
14. All the variety, all the charm, all the beauty of life is made up of light and shadow. — Leo Tolstoy
15. Rummaging in our souls, we often dig up something that ought to have lain there unnoticed. — Leo Tolstoy
16. Boredom: the desire for desires. — Leo Tolstoy
17. Spring is the time of plans and projects. — Leo Tolstoy
18. Without knowing what I am and why I am here, life is impossible. — Leo Tolstoy
19. Everyone thinks of changing the world, but no one thinks of changing himself. — Leo Tolstoy
20. A man is like a fraction whose numerator is what he is and whose denominator is what he thinks of himself. The larger the denominator, the smaller the fraction. — Leo Tolstoy
21. The chief difference between words and deeds is that words are always intended by men for their pleasure, but deeds are not. — Leo Tolstoy
22. Truth, like gold, is to be obtained not by its growth, but by washing away from it all that is not gold. — Leo Tolstoy
23. Each person’s task in life is to become an increasingly better person. — Leo Tolstoy
24. 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. — Leo Tolstoy
25. People try to do all sorts of clever and difficult things to improve life instead of doing the simplest, easiest thing — refusing to participate in activities that make life bad. — Leo Tolstoy
26. 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. — Leo Tolstoy
27. To sin is a human business, to justify sins is a devilish business. — Leo Tolstoy
28. Every lie is a poison; there are no harmless lies. Only the truth is safe. Only the truth gives me consolation. — Leo Tolstoy
29. The most difficult subjects can be explained to the most slow-witted man if he has not formed any idea of them already; but the simplest thing cannot be made clear to the most intelligent man if he is firmly persuaded that he knows already, without a shadow of doubt, what is laid before him. — Leo Tolstoy
30. Freethinkers are those who are willing to use their minds without prejudice and without fearing to understand things that clash with their own customs, privileges, or beliefs. — Leo Tolstoy
31. Nothing is so necessary for a young man as the company of intelligent women. — Leo Tolstoy
32. Everything comes in time to him who knows how to wait. — Leo Tolstoy
33. It is as if I had been going downhill while I imagined I was going up. — Leo Tolstoy
34. What if my whole life has been wrong? — Leo Tolstoy
35. In place of death there was light. — Leo Tolstoy
36. Death is finished, he said to himself. It is no more. — Leo Tolstoy
37. One of the most common and widespread superstitions is that every man has only his own definite and particular qualities. — Leo Tolstoy
38. Nietzsche was stupid and abnormal. — Leo Tolstoy
39. Happy, happy, never-returning time of childhood! — Leo Tolstoy
40. If you look for perfection, you’ll never be content. — Leo Tolstoy
41. Be bad, but at least don’t be a liar, a deceiver! — Leo Tolstoy
42. And you know, there’s less charm in life when you think about death — but it’s more peaceful. — Leo Tolstoy
43. It’s much better to do good in a way that no one knows anything about it. — Leo Tolstoy
44. But that’s the whole aim of civilization: to make everything a source of enjoyment. — Leo Tolstoy
45. Is it really possible to tell someone else what one feels? — Leo Tolstoy
46. I simply want to live; to cause no evil to anyone but myself. — Leo Tolstoy
47. Humanity unceasingly strives forward from a lower, more partial and obscure understanding of life to one more general and more lucid. — Leo Tolstoy

Leo Tolstoy Quotes on Love and Marriage

No novelist understood the human heart like Tolstoy. These leo tolstoy quotes on love explore marriage, devotion, beauty, and the strange, unreasonable force that moves us toward one another.

1. When you love someone, you love the person as they are, and not as you’d like them to be. — Leo Tolstoy
2. What counts in making a happy marriage is not so much how compatible you are but how you deal with incompatibility. — Leo Tolstoy
3. Love is life. All, everything that I understand, I understand only because I love. — Leo Tolstoy
4. Yes, love… but not the love that loves for something, to gain something, or because of something, but that love that I felt for the first time, when dying, I saw my enemy and loved him. — Leo Tolstoy
5. Only people who are capable of loving strongly can also suffer great sorrow, but this same necessity of loving serves to counteract their grief and heals them. — Leo Tolstoy
6. Where love is, God is. — Leo Tolstoy
7. What a strange illusion it is to suppose that beauty is goodness. — Leo Tolstoy
8. I have now understood that though it seems to men that they live by care for themselves, in truth it is love alone by which they live. — Leo Tolstoy
9. Love is God, and to die means that I, a particle of love, shall return to the general and eternal source. — Leo Tolstoy
10. The whole trouble is that people think there are conditions excluding the necessity of love in their intercourse with man, but such conditions do not exist. — Leo Tolstoy
11. Love is the only way to rescue humanity from all ills. — Leo Tolstoy
12. Respect was invented to cover the empty place where love should be. — Leo Tolstoy
13. 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. — Leo Tolstoy
14. He stepped down, trying not to look long at her, as if she were the sun, yet he saw her, like the sun, even without looking. — Leo Tolstoy
15. Seize the moments of happiness, love and be loved! That is the only reality in the world, all else is folly. — Leo Tolstoy
16. Love. The reason I dislike that word is that it means too much for me, far more than you can understand. — Leo Tolstoy
17. There can be no peace for us, only misery, and the greatest happiness. — Leo Tolstoy
18. He was afraid of defiling the love which filled his soul. — Leo Tolstoy
19. In order to carry through any undertaking in family life, there must necessarily be either complete division between the husband and wife, or loving agreement. — Leo Tolstoy
20. But the law of loving others could not be discovered by reason, because it is unreasonable. — Leo Tolstoy
21. Loving with human love, one may pass from love to hatred; but divine love cannot change. Nothing, not even death, can shatter it. It is the very nature of the soul. — Leo Tolstoy
22. He who has love, is in God, and God is in him, for God is love. — Leo Tolstoy
23. Energy rests upon love; and come as it will, there’s no forcing it. — Leo Tolstoy

Leo Tolstoy Quotes on Happiness and Simplicity

Tolstoy believed happiness was simple — and that we complicate it. These leo tolstoy quotes on happiness return again and again to nature, useful work, and the quiet life.

1. If you want to be happy, be. — Leo Tolstoy
2. Happiness does not depend on outward things, but on the way we see them. — Leo Tolstoy
3. Happiness is an allegory, unhappiness a story. — Leo Tolstoy
4. Joy can be real only if people look upon their life as a service and have a definite object in life outside themselves and their personal happiness. — Leo Tolstoy
5. The only significance of life consists in helping to establish the kingdom of God. — Leo Tolstoy
6. One of the first conditions of happiness is that the link between man and nature shall not be broken. — Leo Tolstoy
7. I have lived through much, and now I think I have found what is needed for happiness: a quiet secluded life in the country, with the possibility of being useful to people. — Leo Tolstoy
8. There is no greatness where there is no simplicity, goodness, and truth. — Leo Tolstoy
9. 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. — Leo Tolstoy
10. I’m like a starving man who has been given food. Maybe he’s cold, and his clothes are torn, and he’s ashamed, but he’s not unhappy. — Leo Tolstoy
11. Pierre was right when he said that one must believe in the possibility of happiness in order to be happy, and I now believe in it. Let the dead bury the dead, but while I’m alive, I must live and be happy. — Leo Tolstoy
12. The Lord had given them the day and the Lord had given them the strength. And the day and the strength had been dedicated to labor, and the labor was its own reward. — Leo Tolstoy

Leo Tolstoy Quotes on Faith, Truth and Art

After his spiritual crisis, Tolstoy wrote A Confession and What Is Art? These leo tolstoy quotes wrestle with God, truth, and what art is actually for.

1. Something magical has happened to me: like a dream when one feels frightened and creepy, and suddenly wakes up to the knowledge that no such terrors exist. I have wakened up. — Leo Tolstoy
2. My life came to a standstill. — Leo Tolstoy
3. What will come of what I am doing today? What will come of my whole life? — Leo Tolstoy
4. Faith is the force of life. — Leo Tolstoy
5. The only absolute knowledge attainable by man is that life is meaningless. — Leo Tolstoy
6. Art is not a handicraft, it is the transmission of feeling the artist has experienced. — Leo Tolstoy
7. To say that a work of art is good, but incomprehensible to the majority of men, is the same as saying of some kind of food that it is very good but that most people can’t eat it. — Leo Tolstoy
8. The business of art lies just in this — to make that understood and felt which, in the form of an argument, might be incomprehensible and inaccessible. — Leo Tolstoy
9. The hero of my tale, whom I love with all the power of my soul, whom I have tried to portray in all his beauty, who has been, is, and will be beautiful, is Truth. — Leo Tolstoy
10. Christianity, with its doctrine of humility, of forgiveness, of love, is incompatible with the State, with its haughtiness, its violence, its punishment, its wars. — Leo Tolstoy
11. Life is everything. Life is God. Everything changes and moves and that movement is God. And while there is life there is joy in consciousness of the divine. To love life is to love God. — Leo Tolstoy
12. God is the same everywhere. — Leo Tolstoy
13. We call beauty that which supplies us with a particular pleasure. — Leo Tolstoy
14. Art is not a pleasure, a solace, or an amusement; art is a great matter. Art is an organ of human life, transmitting man’s reasonable perception into feeling. — Leo Tolstoy
15. In the spiritual realm nothing is indifferent: what is not useful is harmful. — Leo Tolstoy
16. Religion reveals the meaning of life, and science only applies this meaning to the course of circumstances. — Leo Tolstoy
17. Genuine religion is not about speculating about God or the soul or about what happened in the past or will happen in the future; it cares only about one thing: finding out exactly what should or should not be done in this lifetime. — Leo Tolstoy
18. A real work of art can only arise in the soul of an artist occasionally, as the fruit of the life he has lived, just as a child is conceived by its mother. — Leo Tolstoy

Leo Tolstoy Quotes on War and Power

He watched armies march and saw through the vanity of generals and governments alike. These leo tolstoy quotes on war and power are as unsparing as they are timely.

1. War is not a polite recreation but the vilest thing in life, and we ought to understand that and not play at war. — Leo Tolstoy
2. A battle is won by him who firmly resolves to win it. — Leo Tolstoy
3. 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. — Leo Tolstoy
4. War is so unjust and ugly that all who wage it must try to stifle the voice of conscience within themselves. — Leo Tolstoy
5. 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. — Leo Tolstoy
6. Government is an association of men who do violence to the rest of us. — Leo Tolstoy
7. The truth is that the State is a conspiracy designed not only to exploit, but above all to corrupt its citizens. — Leo Tolstoy
8. Patriotism is the principle that will justify the training of wholesale murderers. — Leo Tolstoy
9. The habits of the military class are the absence of freedom, that is, discipline, idleness, ignorance, cruelty, debauchery, and drunkenness. — Leo Tolstoy
10. Kings are the slaves of history. — Leo Tolstoy
11. If everyone fought for their own convictions there would be no war. — Leo Tolstoy
12. The earth is the general and equal possession of all humanity and therefore cannot be the property of individuals. — Leo Tolstoy
13. Man by violating his own feelings becomes cruel. And how deeply seated in the human heart is the injunction not to take life. — Leo Tolstoy

Editor’s Picks: The Very Best Leo Tolstoy Quotes

FAQs About Leo Tolstoy Quotes

What is Leo Tolstoy’s most famous quote?

“All happy families are alike; each unhappy family is unhappy in its own way” — the opening line of <em>Anna Karenina</em> (1878) — is his most quoted sentence worldwide. “The two most powerful warriors are patience and time” and “Everyone thinks of changing the world, but no one thinks of changing himself” are close runners-up.

Did Tolstoy really say ‘If you want to be happy, be’?

Yes — the line comes from his personal diary, written when he was a young man. It is one of his most repeated aphorisms, and unlike many internet attributions, this one is genuinely his.

What did Leo Tolstoy write?

His two great novels are <em>War and Peace</em> (1869) and <em>Anna Karenina</em> (1878). He also wrote the novellas <em>The Death of Ivan Ilyich</em> and <em>The Kreutzer Sonata</em>, the spiritual memoir <em>A Confession</em> (1882), the philosophy of art treatise <em>What Is Art?</em> (1898), and dozens of stories, plays, and essays.

Why did Tolstoy give up his wealth and fame?

After a profound spiritual crisis in his late forties — described in <em>A Confession</em> — Tolstoy renounced his aristocratic privileges, embraced radical Christian pacifism, and devoted himself to the poor. His later writings on nonviolence deeply influenced Gandhi and Martin Luther King Jr.

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