Leo Tolstoy quotes - page 21

The time is fast approaching when to call a man a patriot will be the deepest insult you can offer him. Patriotism now means advocating plunder in the interest of the privileged classes of the particular State system into which we have happened to be born. (Leo Tolstoy)
It is by those who have suffered that the world has been advanced. View quote
Leo Tolstoy
He had heard that women often love plain ordinary men, but he did not believe it, because he judged by himself and he could only love beautiful mysterious exceptional women. View quote
Leo Tolstoy
Those whom God wishes to destroy he drives mad. View quote
Leo Tolstoy
When you understand that you will die to-morrow, if not to-day, and nothing will be left, then everything is so unimportant!... So one goes on living, amusing oneself with hunting, with work - anything so as not think of death. View quote
Leo Tolstoy
Life is everything. Life is God. Everything shifts and moves, and this movement is God. And while there is life, there is delight in the self-awareness of the divinity. To love life is to love God. The hardest and most blissful thing is to love this life in one's suffering, in the guiltlessness of suffering. View quote
Leo Tolstoy
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. View quote
Leo Tolstoy
To us, it is incomprehensible that millions of Christian men killed and tortured each other because Napoleon was ambitious or Alexander was firm, or because England's policy was astute or the Duke of Oldenburg was wronged. We cannot grasp what connection such circumstances have the with the actual fact of slaughter and violence: why because the Duke was wronged, thousands of men from the other side of Europe killed and ruined the people of Smolensk and Moscow and were killed by them. View quote
Leo Tolstoy
Everything intelligent is so boring. View quote
Leo Tolstoy
A writer is dear and necessary for us only in the measure of which he reveals to us the inner workings of his very soul. View quote
Leo Tolstoy
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 reward. Who was the labor for? What would be its fruits? These were irrelevant and idle questions. (Leo Tolstoy)
Every man had his personal habits, passions, and impulses toward goodness, beauty, and truth. View quote
Leo Tolstoy
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. View quote
Leo Tolstoy
I feel not only that I cannot disappear, as nothing disappears in the world, but that I will always be and have always been. I feel that, besides me, above me, spirits live, and that in this world there is truth. View quote
Leo Tolstoy
All governments are in equal measure good and evil. The best ideal is anarchy. View quote
Leo Tolstoy
Though it is possible to utter words only with the intention to fulfill the will of God, it is very difficult not to think about the impression which they will produce on men and not to form them accordingly. But deeds you can do quite unknown to men, only for God. And such deeds are the greatest joy that a man can experience. View quote
Leo Tolstoy
Christianity, with its doctrine of humility, of forgiveness, of love, is incompatible with the state, with its haughtiness, its violence, its punishment, its wars. View quote
Leo Tolstoy
He looked at her as a man looks at a faded flower he has gathered, with difficulty recognizing in it the beauty for which he picked and ruined it. And in spite of this he felt that then, when his love was stronger, he could, if he had greatly wished it, have torn that love out of his heart; but now when as at that moment it seemed to him he felt no love for her, he knew that what bound him to her could not be broken. View quote
Leo Tolstoy
I have discovered nothing. I have only found out what I knew. I understand the force that in the past gave me life, and now too gives me life. I have been set free from falsity, I have found the Master. View quote
Leo Tolstoy
I think that when you remember, remember, remember everything like that, you could go on until you remember what was there before you were in the world. View quote
Leo Tolstoy
Only the truth and its expression can establish that new public opinion which will reform the ancient obsolete and pernicious order of life; and yet we not only do not express the truth we know, but often even distinctly give expression to what we ourselves regard as false. If only free men would not rely on that which has no power, and is always fettered upon external aids; but would trust in that which is always powerful and free the truth and its expression! (Leo Tolstoy)
He looked at her as a man looks at a faded flower he has gathered, with difficulty recognizing the beauty for which he picked and ruined it. View quote
Leo Tolstoy
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. View quote
Leo Tolstoy
All the stories and descriptions of that time without exception peak only of the patriotism, self-sacrifice, despair, grief, and heroism of the Russians. But in reality it was not like that...The majority of the people paid no attention to the general course of events but were influenced only by their immediate personal interests. View quote
Leo Tolstoy
Knowledge is real knowledge only when it is acquired by the efforts of your intellect, not by memory. View quote
Leo Tolstoy