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Leo Tolstoy Quotes
1828–1910 Russia
Lev Nikolayevitch Tolstoy [Ле́в Никола́евич Толсто́й, usually rendered Leo Tolstoy, or sometimes Tolstoi] (9 September 1828 – 20 November 1910) was a Russian writer, philosopher and social activist (social critic), whose novels War and Peace and Anna Karenina are internationally praised classics of world literature. He was a major influence on the development of Christian anarchism and pacifism, contributing to such nonviolent resistance movements as those of Mahatma Gandhi, Martin Luther King, Jr., and James Bevel.
Russia Academics Anarchists Aristocrats Educators Also known as: Leo Tolstoi, Leo, Count Tolstoy, Lev Nikolayevitch Tolstoy, Lev Tolstoy, Tolstoy, Tolstoy, Leo
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215 quotes
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.
Christianity and Patriotism (1895)
What is now happening to the people of the East as of the West is like what happens to every individual when he passes from childhood to adolescence and from youth to manhood.
A Letter to a Hindu (1908)
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. He who has love, is in God, and God is in him, for God is love.
What Men Live By (1881)
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.
Sevastopol in May (1855)
It is terrible when people do not know God, but it is worse when people identify as God what is not God.
The further you progress, the higher the ideal of perfection toward which you strive rises.
There is only one enduring happiness in life—to live for others.
Family Happiness (1859)
It is often better for a person to recognize a sin than to do a good deed. Recognizing a sin makes a person humble. Doing a good deed often can feed a person's pride.
When a person is haughty, he distances himself from other people and thereby deprives himself of one of life's biggest pleasures—open, joyful communication with everyone.
Spiritual beauty or the good, generally not only does not coincide with the typical meaning of beauty, it is its opposite.
What is Art? (1897)
Humanity unceasingly strives forward from a lower, more partial and obscure understanding of life to one more general and more lucid.
What is Art? (1897)
But just what this good patriotism is, no one explains.
Ivan Ilych's life had been most simple and most ordinary and therefore most terrible.
The Death of Ivan Ilyich (1886)
If one has no vanity in this life of ours, there is no sufficient reason for living.
The Kreutzer Sonata (1889)
God is the infinite ALL. Man is only a finite manifestation of Him.
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.
Those who neither struggle against violence nor take part in it can no more be enslaved than water can be cut.
The Meaning of the Russian Revolution (1906)
All that may be so and mankind is ready to agree with it, but it is not what was asked.
War and Peace (1865)
There is only one significance, you are a worker.
Last Diaries (1979)
The only thing that we know is that we know nothing — and that is the highest flight of human wisdom.
War and Peace (1865)
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