Leo Tolstoy Quotes

“it's much better to do good in a way that no one knows anything about it.”
― Leo Tolstoy, Anna Karenina

“All the diversity, all the charm, and all the beauty of life are made up of light and shade.”
― Leo Tolstoy, Anna Karenina

“He looked at her as a man might look at a faded flower he had plucked, in which it was difficult for him to trace the beauty that had made him pick and so destroy it”
― Leo Tolstoy, Anna Karenina

“All we can know is that we know nothing. And that's the height of human wisdom.”
― Leo Tolstoy, War and Peace

“I am always with myself, and it is I who am my tormentor.”
― Leo Tolstoy

“But that's the whole aim of civilization: to make everything a source of enjoyment.”
― Leo Tolstoy, Anna Karenina

“But every acquisition that is disproportionate to the labor spent on it is dishonest.”
― Leo Tolstoy, Anna Karenina

“Just think! This whole world of ours is only a speck of mildew sprung up on a tiny planet, yet we think we can have something great - thoughts,, actions! They are all but grains of sand”
― Leo Tolstoy, Anna Karenina

“He knew she was there by the joy and terror that took possession of his heart [...] Everything was lit up by her. She was the smile that brightened everything around.”
― Leo Tolstoy, Anna Karenina

“She put both her hands on his shoulders and gazed at him long, with a deep look of ecstasy and yet searchingly. She scrutinized his face to make up for the time she had not seen him. She compared, as she did at every interview with him, the image her fancy painted of him (incomparably finer than, and impossible in actual existence) with his real self”
― Leo Tolstoy, Anna Karenina

“I felt a wish never to leave that room - a wish that dawn might never come, that my present frame of mind might never change.”
― Leo Tolstoy, Семейное счастие

“The acquisition by dishonest means and cunning,' said Levin, feeling that he was incapable of clearly defining the borderline between honesty and dishonesty. 'Like the profits made by banks,' he went on. 'This is evil, I mean, the acquisition of enormous fortunes without work, as it used to be with the spirit monopolists. Only the form has changed. Le roi est mort, vive le roi! Hardly were the monopolies abolished before railways and banks appeared: just another way of making money without work.”
― Leo Tolstoy, Anna Karenina

“The more mental effort he made the clearer he saw that it was undoubtedly so: that he had really forgotten and overlooked one little circumstance in life - that Death would come and end everything, so that it was useless to begin anything, and that there was no help for it, Yes it was terrible but true”
― Leo Tolstoy, Anna Karenina

“Blessed are the peacemakers; theirs is the kingdom of heaven”
― Leo Tolstoy, Anna Karenina

“In everything, almost in everything, I wrote I was guided by the need of collecting ideas which, linked together, would be the expression of myself, though each individual idea, expressed separately in words, loses its meaning, is horribly debased when only one of the links, of which it forms a part, is taken by itself. But the interlinking of these ideas is not, I think, an intellectual process, but something else, and it is impossible to express the source of this interlinking directly in words; it can only be done indirectly by describing images, actions, and situations in words.”
― Leo Tolstoy

“It is dreadful that one cannot tear our the past by the roots. We cannot tear it out but we can hide the memory of it.”
― Leo Tolstoy, Anna Karenina

“The whole detachment was so quite that I could distinctly hear all the mingling sounds of night, so full of enchanting mystery: the mournful howling of distant jackals, now like a despairing lament, now like laughter; the sonorous, monotonous song of crickets, frogs, quails; a rumbling noise whose cause baffled me and which seemed to be coming even nearer; and all of Nature's barely audible nocturnal sounds that defy explanation or definition and merge in one rich, beautiful harmony that we call the stillness of the night.”
― Leo Tolstoy, The Death of Ivan Ilych and Other Stories

“All the evil in man, one would think, should disappear on contact with Nature, the most spontaneous expression of beauty and goodness.”
― Leo Tolstoy, The Death of Ivan Ilych & Other Stories

“sole meaning of life is to serve humanity.”
― Leo Tolstoy

“— Я хотел сказать только, что все мысли, которые имеют огромные последствия, — всегда просты. Вся моя мысль в том, что ежели люди порочные связаны между собой и составляют силу, то людям честным надо сделать только то же самое. Ведь так просто.

Пьер Безухов

Л. Н. Толстой, "Война и мир", Эпилог, Часть первая”
― Лев Толстой, Война и мир I

“I valued his love; I felt that he thought me better than all other young women in the world, and I could not help wishing him to go on being deceived about me. Without wishing to deceive him, I did deceive him, and I became better myself while deceiving him.”
― Leo Tolstoy, Семейное счастие

“Well, my friends, don’t let my ways surprise you. I have read Malatesta, Tolstoy and Zola, so I have understood many things that I couldn’t before”
― Luisa Capetillo

“- Я? Да, я озабочен; но, кроме того, меня это все стесняет, - сказал он. - Ты не можешь представить себе, как для меня, деревенского жителя, все это дико, как ногти того господина, которого я видел у тебя...
- Да, я видел, что ногти бедного Гриневича тебя очень заинтересовали, - смеясь, сказал Степан Аркадьич.
- Не могу, - отвечал Левин. - Ты постарайся, войди в меня, стань на точку зрения деревенского жителя. Мы в деревне стараемся привести свои руки в такое положение, чтоб удобно было ими работать; для этого обстригаем ногти, засучиваем иногда рукава. А тут люди нарочно отпускают ногти, насколько они могут держаться, и прицепляют в виде запонок блюдечки, чтоб уж ничего нельзя было делать руками.”
― Leo Tolstoy, Анна Каренина. Том 1

“Hard as Stepan Arkadyich tried to be a solicitous father and husband, he never could remember that he had a wife and children.”
― Leo Tolstoy, Anna Karenina, Vol 3 of 8

“Tolstoy was not associated with any revolutionary group but his writings had a tremendous influence. A continuous stream of Utopians, rebels and cranks passed in and out of his doors. When I was a guest at Yasnaya Polyana, his country estate, I was shocked by the depth of his despondency, and after he had forecast, with a foresight given only to genius, the bloody upheavals to come, I left his presence deeply regretting that age, moral distress and spiritual loneliness rendered him incapable of looking joyfully forward to what many believed would be the birth of a great and enduring democratic Russian Republic.”
― Robert Hunter, Revolution Why, How, When?

“There are no conditions of life to which a man cannot accustom himself, especially if he sees that every one around him lives in the same way.”
― Leo Tolstoy, Anna Karenina

“A great Russian writer once wrote that happy families are all alike, while each unhappy family is unhappy in its own way. Like all oft-quoted lines from bona fide geniuses, it remains a truism beyond question and yet from the moment I first read that famous first line I had my doubts. Raised, as I was, in an unhappy family that shattered apart before I was out of the single digits, I always believed the exotic and differentiated lives were lived on the other side of the dividing line between happy and not. The happy families I knew seemed to burst with possibilities; the permutations of their varied interests and eccentricities, the diversity of their achievements, the myriad of strange traditions and customs culled from their everyday happiness seemed unending.”
― William Lashner, Past Due

“Simonson was one of those people, chiefly of a masculine type, whose actions follow the dictates of their reason and are determined by it. Novodvorov belonged, on the contrary, to the class of people of a feminine type, whose reason is directed partly towards the attainment of aims set by their feelings, partly to the justification of acts instigated by their feelings.”
― Leo Tolstoy, Resurrection

“It is a commonplace fact that there is no one so low in the world that he cannot find some one viler than himself, and consequently puff with pride and self-contentment.”
― Leo Tolstoy , The Kreutzer Sonata and Other Short Stories

“You are vile, you are loathsome to me!' she cried, growing more and more excited. 'Yout tears are just water! You never loved me; there's no heart, no nobility in your! You're disgusting, vile, a stranger, yes, a total stranger to me!' With pain and spite she uttered this word so terrible for her - 'stranger'.”
― Leo Tolstoy, Anna Karenina