Quotes from Leo Tolstoy

Everyone wants to change the world, but nobody wants to change himself.

To love life is to love God.

Love does not exist. There exists the physical need for intercourse, and the rational need for a mate in life.

True life is lived when tiny changes occur.

There are no conditions to which a man cannot become accustomed.

Art is a human activity, consisting in this, that one man consciously, by means of external signs, hands on to others feelings he has worked through, and other people are infected by these feelings and also experience them.

To love one's neighbors, to love one's enemies, to love everything - to love God in all His manifestations - human love serves to love those dear to us but to love one's enemies we need divine love.

You consider war to be inevitable? Very good. Let everyone who advocates war be enrolled in a special regiment of advance-guards, for the front of every storm, of every attack, to lead them all!

Violence produces only something resembling justice, but it distances people from the possibility of living justly, without violence.

Never did Christ utter a single word attesting to a personal resurrection and a life beyond the grave.

There is no greatness where there is not simplicity.

Men are so accustomed to maintaining external order by violence that they cannot conceive of life being possible without violence.

And once he had seen this, he could never again see it otherwise, just as we cannot reconstruct an illusion once it has been explained.

War is not a polite recreation but the vilest thing in life, and we ought to understand that and not play at war.

Where is there any book of the law so clear to each man as that written in his heart?

What an immense mass of evil must result...from allowing men to assume the right of anticipating what may happen.

All the horrors of the reign of terror were based on concern for public tranquility.

Real wisdom is not the knowledge of everything, but the knowledge of which things in life are necessary, which are less necessary, and which are completely unnecessary to know.

Many people have ideas on how others should change; few people have ideas on how they should change.

truth, like gold, is to be obtained not by its growth, but by washing away from it all that is not gold.

Every reform by violence is to be deprecated, because it does little to correct the evil while men remain as they are, and because wisdom has no need of violence.

When you love someone, you love the person as they are, and not as you'd like them to be.

All, everything that I understand, I understand only because I love.

... in marriage the great thing was love, and that with love one would always be happy, for happiness rests only on oneself.