Famous Quotes

Quotes by Leo Tolstoy

• A man can live and be healthy without killing animals for food therefore, if he eats meat, he participates in taking animal life merely for the sake of his appetite.
• All happy families resemble one another, each unhappy family is unhappy in its own way.
• All violence consists in some people forcing others, under threat of suffering or death, to do what they do not want to do.
• All, everything that I understand, I understand only because I love.
• Art is not a handicraft, it is the transmission of feeling the artist has experienced.
• Even in the valley of the shadow of death, two and two do not make six.
• Everyone thinks of changing the world, but no one thinks of changing himself.
• Faith is the sense of life, that sense by virtue of which man does not destroy himself, but continues to live on. It is the force whereby we live.
• Government is an association of men who do violence to the rest of us.
• If so many men, so many minds, certainly so many hearts, so many kinds of love.
• If there existed no external means for dimming their consciences, one-half of the men would at once shoot themselves, because to live contrary to one's reason is a most intolerable state, and all men of our time are in such a state.
• If you want to be happy, be.
• 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.
• In the name of God, stop a moment, cease your work, look around you.
• It is amazing how complete is the delusion that beauty is goodness.
• Music is the shorthand of emotion.
• One of the first conditions of happiness is that the link between Man and Nature shall not be broken.
• Our body is a machine for living. It is organized for that, it is its nature. Let life go on in it unhindered and let it defend itself.
• The changes in our life must come from the impossibility to live otherwise than according to the demands of our conscience not from our mental resolution to try a new form of life.
• The chief difference between words and deeds is that words are always intended for men for their approbation, but deeds can be done only for God.
• The greater the state, the more wrong and cruel its patriotism, and the greater is the sum of suffering upon which its power is founded.
• The two most powerful warriors are patience and time.
• There is no greatness where there is no simplicity, goodness and truth.
• To say that a work of art is good, but incomprehensible to the majority of men, is the same as saying of some kind of food that it is very good but that most people can't eat it.
• True life is lived when tiny changes occur.
• Truth, like gold, is to be obtained not by its growth, but by washing away from it all that is not gold.
• War is so unjust and ugly that all who wage it must try to stifle the voice of conscience within themselves.
• War on the other hand is such a terrible thing, that no man, especially a Christian man, has the right to assume the responsibility of starting it.
• Without knowing what I am and why I am here, life is impossible.