Quotes from Leo Tolstoy

The greater the state, the more wrong and cruel its patriotism, and the greater is the sum of suffering upon which its power is founded.

All violence consists in some people forcing others, under threat of suffering or death, to do what they do not want to do.

The chief difference between words and deeds is that words are always intended for men for their approbation, but deeds can be done only for God.

How important the concept of God is, and how instead of valuing what has been given us, we with light hearts spurn it because of absurdities that have been attached to it.

The law condemns and punishes only actions within certain definite and narrow limits; it thereby justifies, in a way, all similar actions that lie outside those limits.

No one could give her such soothing and sensible consolation as this little three-month-old creature when he lay at her breast and she felt the movement of his lips and the snuffling of his tiny nose.

"Thou shalt not kill" does not apply to murder of one's own kind only, but to all living beings; and this Commandment was inscribed in the human breast long before it was proclaimed from Sinai.

Our body is a machine for living. It is organized for that, it is its nature. Let life go on in it unhindered and let it defend itself, it will do more than if you paralyze it by encumbering it with remedies.

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.

I am sure that nothing has such a decisive influence upon a man's course as his personal appearance, and not so much his appearance as his belief in its attractiveness or unattractiveness.

All happy families resemble one another, but each unhappy family is unhappy in its own way.

As long as there are slaughterhouses, there will be battlefields.

Crude, immoral, vulgar and senseless.

Everything that I understand, I understand only because I love.

Joy can be real only if people look on their life as a service, and have a definite object in life outside themselves and their personal happiness.

One ought only to write when one leaves a piece of ones flesh in the ink-pot each time one dips one's pen.

The Brahmins say that in their books there are many predictions of times in which it will rain. But press those books as strongly as you can, you can not get out of them a drop of water. So you can not get out of all the books that contain the best precepts the smallest good deed.

The Jew – is the symbol of eternity…. He is the one who for so long had guarded the prophetic message and transmitted it to all mankind…. The Jew is eternal. He is the embodiment of eternity.

The more we live by our intellect, the less we understand the meaning of life.

We lost because we told ourselves we lost.

If you look for perfection, you'll never be content.

I think... if it is true that there are as many minds as there are heads, then there are as many kinds of love as there are hearts.

It is amazing how complete is the delusion that beauty is goodness.

He stepped down, trying not to look long at her, as if she were the sun, yet he saw her, like the sun, even without looking.