Leo Tolstoy

Quotes

• “What is now happening to the people of the East as of the West is like what happens to every individual when he passes f...”
• “Several times I asked myself, "Can it be that I have overlooked something, that there is something which I have failed t...”
• “In what did Tolstoi's work actually consist? It is the outcry of the universal conscience. His works voice the conscienc...”
• “All his life Alexey Alexandrovitch had lived and worked in official spheres, having to do with the reflection of life. A...”
• “A commercial company enslaved a nation comprising two hundred millions. Tell this to a man free from superstition and he...”
• “I thought: "I am perishing of cold and hunger, and here is a man thinking only of how to clothe himself and his wife, an...”
• “I know that most men - not only those considered clever, but even those who are very clever and capable of understanding...”
• “Why, you have tried to improve before, and failed," the tempter in his soul whispered. "What is the good of trying again...”
• “When I was working on China Men, I remember reading a critic who was praising the great male writers, like Flaubert and ...”
• “The civilized pagan recognizes life not in himself alone, but in societies of men-in the tribe, the clan, the family, th...”
• “People continued - regardless of all that leads man forward - to try to unite the incompatibles : the virtue of love, an...”
• “Art is not, as the metaphysicians say, the manifestation of some mysterious Idea of beauty or God; it is not, as the aes...”
• “Nearly a century after his death, Leo Nikolayevich Tolstoy remains a giant in the world of literature. While the impact ...”
• “He crossed his hands on his breast, as he used to do when a child, raised his eyes and said:"Lord, help me, teach me; co...”
• “There was something in her higher than what surrounded her. There was in her the glow of the real diamond among glass im...”
• “Science may fall back on its stupid excuse that science works for science, and that when it has been developed by the sc...”
• “Tostoy's message has not grown out-of-date. In the present "end of an age" when fear and anxiety and collective crime ha...”
• “Men think it right to eat animals, because they are led to believe that God sanctions it. This is untrue. No matter in w...”
• “If you want him defined, here he is: a prime, well-fed beast such as takes medals at the cattle shows, and nothing more,...”
• “The Churches as Churches—as institutions affirming their own infallibility—are anti-Christian institutions. ...”
• “He who exalts himself shall be humbled; and he who humbles himself shall be exalted." (Matthew 23:12) The person who exa...”
• “Variant: I know that most men, including those at ease with problems of the greatest complexity, can seldom accept even ...”
• “The real pioneers in ideas, in art and in literature have remained aliens to their time, misunderstood and repudiated. A...”
• “There was no answer, except the general answer life gives to all the most complex and insoluble questions. That answer i...”
• “Three days later the little princess was buried, and Prince Andrei went up the steps to where the coffin stood, to give ...”
• “The savage recognizes life only in himself and his personal desires. His interest in life is concentrated on himself alo...”
• “In historical events great men - so-called - are but labels serving to give a name to the event, and like labels they ha...”
• “Leo Tolstoy, the greatest anti-patriot of our time, defines patriotism as the principle that will justify the training o...”
• “Remember then: there is only one time that is important-Now! It is the most important time because it is the only time w...”
• “If people would but understand that they are not the sons of some fatherland or other, nor of Governments, but are sons ...”
• “If the slave-owner of our times has no slave, John, whom he can send to the cesspool, he has five shillings, of which hu...”
• “As soon as men live entirely in accord with the law of love natural to their hearts and now revealed to them, which excl...”
• “Understand then all of you, especially the young, that to want to impose an imaginary state of government on others by v...”
• “We cannot pretend that we do not see the armed policeman who marches up and down beneath our window to guarantee our sec...”
• “However, according to Leland A. Feltzer, "Tolstoy and Mormonism", Dialogue 6, no. 1 (Spring 1971): 13-29, DOI:10.2307/45...”
• “Truth is ... one approach to the attainment of the good, but in and of itself, it is neither the good nor the beautiful ...”
• “People try so hard to believe in leaders now, pitifully hard. But we no sooner get a popular reformer or politician or s...”
• “The slow progress towards juster international relations may be traced to the distinguished jurist of the Netherlands, G...”
• “Amid this life based on coercion, one and the same thought constantly emerged among different nations, namely, that in e...”
• “They must understand that we can only lose by taking the offensive. Patience and time are my warriors, my champions," th...”
• “War is not a courtesy but the most horrible thing in life; and we ought to understand that, and not play at war. We ough...”
• “Tell people that war is an evil, and they will laugh; for who does not know it? Tell them that patriotism is an evil, an...”
• “There can be only one permanent revolution - a moral one; the regeneration of the inner man. How is this revolution to t...”
• “Three years ago he was an honest, self-denying youth, ready to devote himself to every good cause; now he was a corrupt ...”
• “He was a revolutionary in his thinking and later in life he was an activist and reformer; he was best known as Russia's ...”
• “Understand that all the evils from which you suffer, you yourselves cause by yielding to the suggestions by which empero...”
• “The revolutionaries say: "The government organization is bad in this and that respect; it must be destroyed and replaced...”
• “My reason will still not understand why I pray, but I shall still pray, and my life, my whole life, independently of any...”
• “In order to correctly define art, it is necessary, first of all, to cease to consider it as a means to pleasure and cons...”
• “Love hinders death. Love is life. All, everything that I understand, I understand only because I love. Everything is, ev...”