Leo Tolstoy quotes - page 3

Be bad, but at least don't be a liar, a deceiver! (Leo Tolstoy)
It's not given to people to judge what's right or wrong. People have eternally been mistaken and will be mistaken, and in nothing more than in what they consider right and wrong. View quote
Leo Tolstoy
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. View quote
Leo Tolstoy
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. View quote
Leo Tolstoy
It's all God's will: you can die in your sleep, and God can spare you in battle. View quote
Leo Tolstoy
And you know, there's less charm in life when you think about death--but it's more peaceful. View quote
Leo Tolstoy
Ivan Ilych's life had been most simple and most ordinary and therefore most terrible. View quote
Leo Tolstoy
Friends we shall never be, you know that yourself. Whether we shall be the happiest or the wretchedest of people--that's in your hands. View quote
Leo Tolstoy
We love people not so much for the good they've done us, as for the good we've done them. View quote
Leo Tolstoy
When one's head is gone one doesn't weep over one's hair! View quote
Leo Tolstoy
Ah, if everyone was as sensitive as you! There's no girl who hasn't gone through that. And it's all so unimportant! (Leo Tolstoy)
How often we sin, how much we deceive, and all for what?... All will end in death, all! View quote
Leo Tolstoy
Smiling with pleasure, they went through their memories, not sad, old people's memories, but poetic, youthful ones, those impressions from the very distant past where dream merges with reality, and they laughed softly, rejoicing at something. View quote
Leo Tolstoy
It's not so much that he can't fall in love, but he has not the weakness necessary. View quote
Leo Tolstoy
Well, pray if you like, only you'd do better to use your judgment. View quote
Leo Tolstoy
People understand the meaning of eating lies in the nourishment of the body only when they cease to consider that the object of that activity is pleasure. ...People understand the meaning of art only when they cease to consider that the aim of that activity is beauty, i.e., pleasure. View quote
Leo Tolstoy
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. View quote
Leo Tolstoy
Every one who has a heart and eyes sees that you, working men, are obliged to pass your lives in want and in hard labor, which is useless to you, while other men, who do not work, enjoy the fruits of your labor that you are the slaves of these men, and that this ought not to exist. View quote
Leo Tolstoy
Condemn me if you choose - I do that myself, - but condemn me, and not the path which I am following, and which I point out to those who ask me where, in my opinion, the path is. View quote
Leo Tolstoy
As soon as men live entirely in accord with the law of love natural to their hearts and now revealed to them, which excludes all resistance by violence, and therefore hold aloof from all participation in violence - as soon as this happens, not only will hundreds be unable to enslave millions, but not even millions will be able to enslave a single individual. View quote
Leo Tolstoy
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)
All, everything that I understand, I understand only because I love. View quote
Leo Tolstoy
If one has no vanity in this life of ours, there is no sufficient reason for living. View quote
Leo Tolstoy
In order to correctly define art, it is necessary, first of all, to cease to consider it as a means to pleasure and consider it as one of the conditions of human life. ...Reflecting on it in this way, we cannot fail to observe that art is one of the means of affective communication between people. View quote
Leo Tolstoy
No one has yet added up all the heavy, stress-filled workdays as well as the hundreds, perhaps thousands, of lives that are wasted to produce the world's amusements. It is for this reason that "amusements” are not so amusing. View quote
Leo Tolstoy