Leo Tolstoy
To get rid of an enemy one must love him.Collection: Love
If everyone fought for their own convictions there would be no war.Collection: War
It is terrible when people do not know God, but it is worse when people identify as God what is not God.Collection: People
Debates conceal rather than reveal the truth. Truth is revealed in solitude.Collection: Solitude
Before we can study the central issues of life today, we must destroy the prejudices and fallacies born of previous centuries.Collection: Issues
Art lifts man from his personal life into the universal life.Collection: Art
The best thoughts most often come in the morning after waking, while still in bed or while walking.Collection: Morning
Everybody wants to change the world, but nobody thinks about changing himself.Collection: Christian
Woman is generally so bad that the difference between a good and a bad woman scarcely exists.Collection: Differences
History would be a wonderful thing – if it were only true.Collection: Would Be
When an individual passes from one period of life to another a time comes when he cannot go on in senseless activity and excitement as before, but has to understand that although he has out-grown what before used to direct him, this does not mean that he must live without any reasonable guidance, but rather that he must formulate for himself an understanding of life corresponding to his age, and having elucidated it must be guided by it. And in the same way a similar time must come in the growth and development of humanity.Collection: Mean
But men are now united in states; that work is done; why now maintain exclusive devotion to one's own state, when this produces terrible evils for all.Collection: Men
There it is!' he thought with rapture. 'When I was already in despair, and when it seemed there would be no end- there it is! She loves me. She's confessed it.Collection: Despair
The march of humanity, springing as it does from an infinite multitude of individual wills, is continuous.Collection: Humanity
Then he thought himself unhappy, but happiness was all in the future; now he felt that the best happiness was already in the past.Collection: Past
There was no solution, save that universal solution which life gives to all questions, even the most complex and insolvable: One must live in the needs of the day--that is, forget oneself.Collection: Giving
We walked to meet each other up at the time of our love and then we have been irresistibly drifting in different directions, and there's no altering that.Collection: Our Love
What time can be more beautiful when the one in which the finest virtues, innocent cheerfulness and indefinable longing for love constitute the sole motives of your life.Collection: Beautiful
Every work of art causes the receiver to enter into a certain kind of relationship both with him who produced the art, and with all those who, simultaneously, previously, or subsequently, receive the same artistic impression. Art is a human activity- that one man consciously by means of certain external signs, hands on to others feelings he has lived through, and that others are touched by these feelings and also experience them.Collection: Art
Nowadays, as before, the public declaration and confession of Orthodoxy is usually encountered among dull-witted, cruel and immoral people who tend to consider themselves very important. Whereas intelligence, honesty, straightforwardness, good-naturedness and morality are qualities usually found among people who claim to be non-believers.Collection: Honesty
An agile but unintelligent and abnormal German, possessed of the mania of grandeur.Collection: Abnormal
I have nothing to make me miserable," she said, getting calmer; "but can you understand that everything has become hateful, loathsome, coarse to me, and I myself most of all? You can't imagine what loathsome thoughts I have about everything." "Why, whatever loathsome thoughts can you have?" asked Dolly, smiling. "The most utterly loathsome and coarse; I can't tell you. It's not unhappiness, or low spirits, but much worse. As though everything that was good in me was all hidden away, and nothing was left but the most loathsome.Collection: Spirit
I now understand that my welfare is only possible if I acknowledge my unity with all the people of the world without exception.Collection: People
A wife's a worry, a non-wife's even worse.Collection: Wife
Where is there any book of the law so clear to each man as that written in his heart?Collection: War
I'm getting old, that's the thing! What's in me now won't be there anymore.Collection: Getting Old
The most important person is the one you are with in this moment.Collection: Important
Violence produces only something resembling justice, but it distances people from the possibility of living justly, without violence.Collection: Peace
And you know, there's less charm in life when you think about death--but it's more peaceful.Collection: Thinking
The question of how things will settle down is the only important question.Collection: Important
If I had any doubts at all about the justice of my dislike for Shakespeare, that doubt vanished completely. What a crude, immoral,vulgar, and senseless work Hamlet is. The whole thing is based on pagan vengeance; the only aim is to gather together as many effects as possible; there is no rhyme or reason about it.Collection: Justice
... it is the work and not the reward that is precious.Collection: Work
History would be an excellent thing if only it were true.Collection: Would Be
He who has a mistaken idea of life, will always have a mistaken idea of death.Collection: Death
The Anarchists are right in everything; in the negation of the existing order, and in the assertion that, without authority, there could not be worse violence than that of authority under existing conditions. They are mistaken only in thinking that Anarchy can be instituted by a revolution. "To establish Anarchy." "Anarchy will be instituted." But it will be instituted only by there being more and more people who do not require protection from governmental power, and by there being more and more people who will be ashamed of applying this power.Collection: Thinking
Real art, like the wife of an affectionate husband, needs no ornaments. But counterfeit art, like a prostitute, must always be decked out. The cause of production of real art is the artist's inner need to express a feeling that has accumulated...The cause of counterfeit art, as of prostitution, is gain. The consequence of true art is the introduction of a new feeling into the intercourse of life... The consequences of counterfeit art are the perversion of man, pleasure which never satisfies, and the weakening of man's spiritual strength.Collection: Spiritual
All the true heroes of history will be forgotten and all the villains will be remembered as heroes.Collection: Hero
For if we allow that human life is always guided by reason, we destroy the premise that life is possible at all.Collection: Life Is
How can one be well...when one suffers morally?Collection: Suffering
Man cannot possess anything as long as he fears death. But to him who does not fear it, everything belongs. If there was no suffering, man would not know his limits, would not know himself.Collection: Men
Life consists in penetrating the unknown, and fashioning our actions in accord with the new knowledge thus acquired.Collection: Our Actions
It seldom happens that a man changes his life through his habitual reasoning. No matter how fully he may sense the new plans and aims revealed to him by reason, he continues to plod along in old paths until his life becomes frustrating and unbearable-he finally makes the change only when his usual life can no longer be tolerated.Collection: Change
My principal sin is doubt. I doubt everything, and am in doubt most of the time.Collection: Doubt
I can't understand how anyone can write without rewriting everything over and over again.Collection: Writing
Human love serves to love those dear to us but to love one's enemies we need divine love.Collection: Love
A quiet secluded life in the country, with the possibility of being useful to people to whom it is easy to do good, and who are not accustomed to have it done to them; then work which one hopes may be of some use; then rest, nature, books, music, love for one's neighbor — such is my idea of happiness.Collection: Inspirational
The magnanimity and sensibility of a lady who faints when she sees a calf being killed: she is so kindhearted that she can't look at blood, but enjoys eating the calf served up with sauce.Collection: Blood
It's too easy to criticize a man when he's out of favour, and to make him shoulder the blame for everybody else's mistakes.Collection: Mistake
Where there is love, there is God also.Collection: Love