Quotes from Leo Tolstoy

Happiness is an allegory, unhappiness a story.

One of the first conditions of happiness is that the link between Man and Nature shall not be broken.

Happiness consists in always aspiring perfection, the pause in any level in perfection is the pause of happiness

Effort is not a means to lead us to happiness. Effort itself is happiness

Then he thought himself unhappy, but happiness was all in the future; now he felt that the best happiness was already in the past.

No matter when, at whatever moment, if she were asked what she was thinking about she could reply quite correctly - one thing, her happiness and her unhappiness.

Our body is a machine for living.

All the true heroes of history will be forgotten and all the villains will be remembered as heroes.

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.

The epitaph that I would write for history would say: I conceal nothing. It is not enough not to lie. One should strive not to lie in a negative sense by remaining silent.

History is the product of vast, amorphous and indecipherable social movements.

History would be an excellent thing if only it were true.

If every man could act as he chose, the whole of history would be a tissue of disconnected accidents.

With friends, one is well; but at home, one is better.

If I know the way home and am walking along it drunkenly, is it any less the right way because I am staggering from side to side!

Levin scowled. The humiliation of his rejection stung him to the heart, as though it were a fresh wound he had only just received. But he was at home, and at home the very walls are a support.

To sin is a human business, to justify sins is a devilish business.

All that day she felt as if she were acting in a theatre with better actors than herself, and that her bad performance was spoiling the whole affair.

The whole world is divided for me into two parts: one is she, and there is all happiness, hope, light; the other is where she is not, and there is dejection and darkness.

I ask one thing: I ask the right to hope and suffer as I do now." Vronsky

I ask one thing only: I ask for the right to hope, to suffer as I do. But if even that cannot be, command me to disappear, and I disappear. You shall not see me if my presence is distasteful to you.

Vegetarianism serves as the criterion by which we know that the pursuit of moral perfection on the part of humanity is genuine and sincere.

In order to know what he is, a man must first know what the sum of this mysterious humanity is, a humanity made up of people who, like himself, do not understand what they are.

The march of humanity, springing as it does from an infinite multitude of individual wills, is continuous.