Quotes from Leo Tolstoy

Man by violating his own feelings becomes cruel. And how deeply seated in the human heart is the injunction not to take life.

I did not myself know what I wanted: I feared life, desired to escape from it, yet still hoped something of it.

The true office of any faith is to give life a meaning which death cannot destroy.

Our whole life is taken up with anxiety for personal security, with preparations for living, so that we really never live at all.

The antagonism between life and conscience may be removed in two ways: by a change of life or by a change of conscience.

In life, in true life, there can be nothing better than what is. Wanting something different than what is, is blasphemy.

He was right in saying that the only certain happiness in life is to live for others.

History, that is to say, the unconscious, universal life of humanity, in the aggregate, every moment profits by the life of kings for itself, as an instrument for the accomplishment of its own ends.

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.

War is so unjust and ugly that all who wage it must try to stifle the voice of conscience within themselves.

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.

...so remember: great achievements take time, there is no overnight success.

The two most powerful warriors are patience and time.

The most important time is Now

Everything comes in time to him who knows how to wait. There is nothing stronger than those two: patience and time, they will do it all.

Spring is the time of plans and projects.

...the more he did nothing, the less time he had to do anything.

To know God and to live is the same thing. God is Life.

Only those live who do good.

As soon as man applies his intelligence to any object at all, he unfailingly destroys the object.

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.

I often think how unfairly life's good fortune is sometimes distributed.

He who has a mistaken idea of life, will always have a mistaken idea of death.

The appreciation of the merits of art (of the emotions it conveys) depends upon an understanding of the meaning of life...