Leo Tolstoy Quotes

Boredom: the desire for desires.

Love is life. All, everything that I understand, I understand only because I love. Everything is, everything exists, only because I love. Everything is united by it alone. Love is God, and to die means that I, a particle of love, shall return to the general and eternal source.

Happiness does not depend on outward things, but on the way we see them.

All great literature is one of two stories; a man goes on a journey or a stranger comes to town.

The strongest of all warriors are these two — Time and Patience.

A man is like a fraction whose numerator is what he is and whose denominator is what he thinks of himself. The larger the denominator, the smaller the fraction.

True life is lived when tiny changes occur.

What counts in making a happy marriage is not so much how compatible you are but how you deal with incompatibility.

Music is the shorthand of emotion.

Which is worse? the wolf who cries before eating the lamb or the wolf who does not.

I sit on a man's back, choking him and making him carry me, and yet assure myself and others that I am very sorry for him and wish to ease his lot by all possible means - except by getting off his back.

What a strange illusion it is to suppose that beauty is goodness.

Historians are like deaf people who go on answering questions that no one has asked them.

Pure and complete sorrow is as impossible as pure and complete joy.

As long as there are slaughter houses there will always be battlefields.

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

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

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

If so many men, so many minds, certainly so many hearts, so many kinds of love.

I know that most men, including those at ease with problems of the greatest complexity, can seldom accept even the simplest and most obvious truth if it be such as would oblige them to admit the falsity of conclusions which they have delighted in explaining to colleagues, which they have proudly taught to others, and which they have woven, thread by thread, into the fabric of their lives.

History would be a wonderful thing – if it were only true.

The sole meaning of life is to serve humanity.

Christianity, with its doctrine of humility, of forgiveness, of love, is incompatible with the state, with its haughtiness, its violence, its punishment, its wars

Art is not a handicraft, it is the transmission of feeling the artist has experienced.

There is no genius where there is not simplicity.