Famous Quotes by Leo Tolstoy |Short Quotes by Leo Tolstoy| Famous Peoples English Quotes

  1. Tell people that war is an evil, and they will laugh; for who does not know it? Tell them that patriotism is an evil, and most of them will agree, but with a reservation. “Yes,” they will say, “wrong patriotism is an evil; but there is another kind, the kind we hold.” But just what this good patriotism is, no one explains.
  2. A woman is generally so bad that the difference between a good and a bad woman scarcely exists.
  3. He could not be mistaken. There were no other eyes like those in the world. There was only one creature in the world who could concentrate for him all the brightness and meaning of life. It was she. It was Kitty.
  4. 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. This state of mind is not common, but it is essential for right thinking.
  5. If I know the way home and am walking along with it drunkenly, is it any less the right way because I am staggering from side to side!
  6. Those attacks upon language and religion in Poland, the Baltic provinces, Alsace, Bohemia, upon the Jews in Russia, in every place that such acts of violence occur—in what name have they been, and are they, perpetrated? In none other than the name of that patriotism which you defend.
    Ask our savage Russifiers of Poland and the Baltic provinces, ask the persecutors of the Jews, why they act thus. They will tell you it is in Defence of their native religion and language; they will tell you that if they do not act thus, their religion and language will suffer—the Russians will be Polonised, Teutonized, Judaised.
  7. One must put oneself in everyone’s position. To understand everything is to forgive everything.
  8. 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.
  9. Reason has discovered the struggle for existence and the law that I must throttle all those who hinder the satisfaction of my desires. That is the deduction reason makes. But the law of loving others could not be discovered by reason, because it is unreasonable.
  10. The activity of art is… as important as the activity of language itself, and as universal.
  11. Science is meaningless because it gives no answer to our question, the only question important for us: ‘what shall we do and how shall we live
  12. But every acquisition that is disproportionate to the labor spent on it is dishonest.
  13. At the approach of danger, there are always two voices that speak with equal force in the heart of man: one very reasonably tells the man to consider the nature of the danger and the means of avoiding it; the other even more reasonable says that it is too painful and harassing to think of the danger, since it is not a man’s power to provide for everything and escape from the general march of events; and that it is, therefore, better to turn aside from the painful subject till it has come, and to think of what is pleasant. In solitude a man generally yields to the first voice; in society to the second.
  14. He felt all the torment of his and her position, all the difficulties they were surrounded by in consequence of their station in life, which exposed them to the eyes of the whole world, obliged them to hide their love, to lie and deceive, and again to lie and deceive, to scheme and constantly think about others while the passion that bound them was so strong that they both forgot everything but their love.
  15. It will pass, it will all pass, we’re going to be so happy! If our love could grow any stronger it would grow stronger because there is something horrifying in it,
  16. She did not want to talk of her sorrow, but with that sorrow in her heart, she could not talk of outside matters.
  17. You can love a person dear to you with human love, but an enemy can only be loved with divine love.
  18. The most mentally deranged people are certainly those who see in others indications of insanity they do not notice in themselves.
  19. But that what was for him the greatest and most cruel injustice appeared to others a quite ordinary occurrence.
  20. Perhaps it’s because I appreciate all I have so much that I don’t worry about what I haven’t got.
  21. Art is a human activity consisting in this, that one consciously, by means of certain external symbols, conveys to others the feelings one has experienced, whereby people so infected by these feelings, also experience them.
  22. Whatever our fate is or maybe, we have made it and do not complain of it.” – Vronksy {Anna Karenina}
  23. You see, if you take pains and learn in order to get a reward, the work will seem hard; but when you work… if you love your work, you will find your reward in that.
  24. I simply want to live; to cause no evil to anyone but myself.
  25. The chief attraction of military service has consisted and will consist in this compulsory and irreproachable idleness.
  26. All newspaper and journalistic activity is an intellectual brothel from which there is no retreat.
  27. If he is really and seriously seeking to live a good life, the first thing from which he will abstain will always be the use of animal food, because…its use is simply immoral, as it involves the performance of an act which is contrary to the moral feeling – killing.
  28. We measure the earth, sun, stars, and ocean depths. We burrow into the depths of the earth for gold. We search for rivers and mountains on the moon. We discover new stars and know their magnitudes. We sound the depths of gorges and build clever machines. Each day brings a new invention. What don’t we think of! What can’t we do! But there is something else, the most important thing of all that we are missing. We do not know exactly what it is. We are like a small child who knows he does not feel well but cannot explain why. We are uneasy because we know a lot of superfluous facts, but we do not know what is really important—ourselves.
  29. The more mental effort he made the clearer he saw that it was undoubtedly so: that he had really forgotten and overlooked one little circumstance in life – that Death would come and end everything, so that it was useless to begin anything, and that there was no help for it, Yes it was terrible but true
  30. Understand then all of you, especially the young, that to want to impose an imaginary state of government on others by violence is not only a vulgar superstition but even a criminal work. Understand that this work, far from assuring the well-being of humanity is only a lie, more or less unconscious hypocrisy, camouflaging the lowest passions we posses.
  31. I say that the God who created the world in six days and who sent His Son, and also his son himself, are not God, but that God is the one existing, incomparable good, the beginning of everything.
  32. Prayer is addressed to the personal God, not because he is personal indeed, I know for certain that he is not personal, because personality is a limitation, while God is unlimited.
  33. This is where the strength of the physician lies, be he a quack, a homeopath, or an allopath. He supplies the perennial demand for comfort, the craving for sympathy that every human sufferer feels.
  34. The highest wisdom is established, not on reason alone, not on those worldly sciences, physics, history, chemistry, and the like, on which intellectual knowledge stumbles. The highest wisdom is one. The highest wisdom has one science, the science of the All, the universal science which explains all creation, and the place that man occupies in it.
  35. 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 to the region of emotion.
  36. Respect was invented to cover the empty place where love should be.
  37. It’s like scarlet fever: one has to get it over.” “Then one should invent a way of inoculating love, like vaccination.
  38. Instead of going to Paris to attend lectures, go to the public library, and you won’t come out for twenty years if you really wish to learn.
  39. For if we allow that human life is always guided by reason, we destroy the premise that life is possible at all.
  40. 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.

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