Most Inspirational Leo Tolstoy Quotes – Writer of Anna Karenina
We have curated a list of some of the most inspirational and remarkable Leo Tolstoy quotes for you. Before directly jumping into the quotes take a look that who was Leo Tolstoy.
Leo Tolstoy is also known as Lev Nikolayevich Tolstoy was a Russian novelist who is often recognized as one of the finest writers of all time. His most famous works were the novels War and Peace (1869) and Anna Karenina (1878), which are often regarded as the pinnacles of realist literature. After a huge moral crisis and spiritual enlightenment in the 1870s, he became a devout Christian anarchist and pacifist. His thoughts on peaceful resistance influenced crucial twentieth-century individuals such as Mahatma Gandhi and Martin Luther King Jr.
So, we have talked about the author and now let’s get to the list of Leo Tolstoy quotes.
List of The Most Inspirational and Remarkable Leo Tolstoy Quotes
1. “If you look for perfection, you’ll never be content.”
― Leo Tolstoy
2. “Everyone thinks of changing the world, but no one thinks of changing himself.”
― Leo Tolstoy
3. “All happy families are alike; each unhappy family is unhappy in its own way.”
― Leo Tolstoy
4. “It is amazing how complete is the delusion that beauty is goodness.”
― Leo Tolstoy
5. “He stepped down, trying not to look long at her, as if she were the sun, yet he saw her, like the sun, even without looking.”
― Leo Tolstoy
6. “I think… if it is true that there are as many minds as there are heads, then there are as many kinds of love as there are hearts.”
― Leo Tolstoy
7. “We can know only that we know nothing. And that is the highest degree of human wisdom.”
― Leo Tolstoy
8. “Respect was invented to cover the empty place where love should be.”
― Leo Tolstoy
9. “If, then, I were asked for the most important advice I could give, that which I considered to be the most useful to the men of our century, I should simply say: in the name of God, stop a moment, cease your work, look around you.”
― Leo Tolstoy
10. “Only people who are capable of loving strongly can also suffer great sorrow, but this same necessity of loving serves to counteract their grief and heals them.”
― Leo Tolstoy
11. “Spring is the time of plans and projects.”
― Leo Tolstoy
12. “If you want to be happy, be.”
― Leo Tolstoy
13. “Is it really possible to tell someone else what one feels?”
― Leo Tolstoy
14. “Spring is the time of plans and projects.”
― Leo Tolstoy
15. “Nothing is so necessary for a young man as the company of intelligent women.”
― Leo Tolstoy
16. “In the name of God, stop a moment, cease your work, look around you.”
― Leo Tolstoy
17. “Rummaging in our souls, we often dig up something that ought to have lain there unnoticed. ”
― Leo Tolstoy
18. “Wrong does not cease to be wrong because the majority share in it.”
― Leo Tolstoy
19. “When you love someone, you love the person as they are, and not as you’d like them to be.”
― Leo Tolstoy
20. “I’ve always loved you, and when you love someone, you love the whole person, just as he or she is, and not as you would like them to be.”
― Leo Tolstoy
21. “Freethinkers are those who are willing to use their minds without prejudice and without fearing to understand things that clash with their own customs, privileges, or beliefs. This state of mind is not common, but it is essential for right thinking…”
― Leo Tolstoy
22. “The two most powerful warriors are patience and time.”
― Leo Tolstoy
23. “Be bad, but at least don’t be a liar, a deceiver!”
― Leo Tolstoy
24. “All the variety, all the charm, all the beauty of life is made up of light and shadow.”
― Leo Tolstoy
25. “The strongest of all warriors are these two — Time and Patience.”
― Leo Tolstoy
26. “If everyone fought for their own convictions there would be no war.”
― Leo Tolstoy
27. “Anything is better than lies and deceit!”
― Leo Tolstoy
28. “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. And to act so is immoral.”
― Leo Tolstoy
29. “Boredom: the desire for desires.”
― Leo Tolstoy
30. “There is no greatness where there is not simplicity, goodness, and truth.”
― Leo Tolstoy
31. “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.”
― Leo Tolstoy
32. “I always loved you, and if one loves anyone, one loves the whole person, just as they are and not as one would like them to be. -Dolly”
― Leo Tolstoy
33. “All great literature is one of two stories; a man goes on a journey or a stranger comes to town.”
― Leo Tolstoy
34. “All the girls in the world were divided into two classes: one class included all the girls in the world except her, and they had all the usual human feelings and were very ordinary girls; while the other class -herself alone- had no weaknesses and was superior to all humanity.”
― Leo Tolstoy
35. “Sometimes she did not know what she feared, what she desired: whether she feared or desired what had been or what would be, and precisely what she desired, she did not know.”
― Leo Tolstoy
36. “The best stories don’t come from “good vs. bad” but “good vs. good.”
― Leo Tolstoy
37. “it’s much better to do good in a way that no one knows anything about it.”
― Leo Tolstoy
38. “If you love me as you say you do,’ she whispered, ‘make it so that I am at peace.”
― Leo Tolstoy
39. “Happiness does not depend on outward things, but on the way we see them.”
― Leo Tolstoy
40. “The whole world is divided for me into two parts: one is she, and there is all happiness, hope, light; the other is where she is not, and there is dejection and darkness…”
― Leo Tolstoy
41. “They’ve got no idea what happiness is, they don’t know that without this love there is no happiness or unhappiness for us–there is no life.”
― Leo Tolstoy
42. “Pierre was right when he said that one must believe in the possibility of happiness in order to be happy, and I now believe in it. Let the dead bury the dead, but while I’m alive, I must live and be happy.”
― Leo Tolstoy
43. “You can love a person dear to you with a human love, but an enemy can only be loved with divine love.”
― Leo Tolstoy
44. “But I’m glad you’ll see me as I am. Above all, I wouldn’t want people to think that I want to prove anything. I don’t want to prove anything, I just want to live; to cause no evil to anyone but myself. I have that right, haven’t I?”
― Leo Tolstoy
45. “True life is lived when tiny changes occur.”
― Leo Tolstoy
46. “But the law of loving others could not be discovered by reason, because it is unreasonable.”
― Leo Tolstoy
47. “It’s hard to love a woman and do anything.”
― Leo Tolstoy
48. “If we admit that human life can be ruled by reason, then all possibility of life is destroyed.”
― Leo Tolstoy
49. “We are asleep until we fall in Love!”
― Leo Tolstoy
50. “He soon felt that the fulfillment of his desires gave him only one grain of the mountain of happiness he had expected. This fulfillment showed him the eternal error men make in imagining that their happiness depends on the realization of their desires.”
― Leo Tolstoy
51. “What counts in making a happy marriage is not so much how compatible you are but how you deal with incompatibility.”
― Leo Tolstoy
52. “Seize the moments of happiness, love and be loved! That is the only reality in the world, all else is folly. It is the one thing we are interested in here.”
― Leo Tolstoy
53. “He felt now that he was not simply close to her, but that he did not know where he ended and she began.”
― Leo Tolstoy
54. “I often think that men don’t understand what is noble and what is ignorant, though they always talk about it.”
― Leo Tolstoy
55. “Love those you hate you.”
― Leo Tolstoy
56. “I simply want to live; to cause no evil to anyone but myself.”
― Leo Tolstoy
57. “Something magical has happened to me: like a dream when one feels frightened and creepy, and suddenly wakes up to the knowledge that no such terrors exist. I have wakened up.”
― Leo Tolstoy
58. “Everything I know, I know because of love.”
― Leo Tolstoy
59. “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.”
― Leo Tolstoy
60. “He was afraid of defiling the love which filled his soul.”
― Leo Tolstoy
61. “Not one word, not one gesture of yours shall I, could I, ever forget…”
― Leo Tolstoy
62. “I wanted movement and not a calm course of existence. I wanted excitement and danger and the chance to sacrifice myself for my love.”
― Leo Tolstoy
63. “All the diversity, all the charm, and all the beauty of life are made up of light and shade.”
― Leo Tolstoy
64. “Every lie is a poison; there are no harmless lies. Only the truth is safe. Only the truth gives me consolation – it is the one unbreakable diamond.”
― Leo Tolstoy
65. “To get rid of an enemy one must love him. ”
― Leo Tolstoy
66. “I’m like a starving man who has been given food. Maybe he’s cold, and his clothes are torn, and he’s ashamed, but he’s not unhappy.”
― Leo Tolstoy
67. “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. ”
― Leo Tolstoy
68. “How can one be well…when one suffers morally?”
― Leo Tolstoy
69. “What a strange illusion it is to suppose that beauty is goodness.”
― Leo Tolstoy
70. “Every heart has its own skeletons.”
― Leo Tolstoy
71. “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
72. “Everything intelligent is so boring.”
― Leo Tolstoy
73. “A man on a thousand mile walk has to forget his goal and say to himself every morning, ‘Today I’m going to cover twenty-five miles and then rest up and sleep.”
― Leo Tolstoy
74. “Human science fragments everything in order to understand it, kills everything in order to examine it. ”
― Leo Tolstoy
75. “He stepped down, avoiding any long look at her as one avoids long looks at the sun, but seeing her as one sees the sun, without looking.”
― Leo Tolstoy
76. “There are no conditions to which a person cannot grow accustomed, especially if he sees that everyone around him lives in the same way.”
― Leo Tolstoy
77. “It’s all God’s will: you can die in your sleep, and God can spare you in battle.”
― Leo Tolstoy
79. “Music is the shorthand of emotion”
― Leo Tolstoy
80. “Happiness is an allegory, unhappiness a story.”
― Leo Tolstoy
81. “I sit on a man’s back choking him and making him carry me, and yet assure myself and others that I am sorry for him and wish to lighten his load by all means possible… except by getting off his back.”
― Leo Tolstoy
82. “Instead of going to Paris to attend lectures, go to the public library, and you won’t come out for twenty years, if you really wish to learn.”
― Leo Tolstoy
83. “Which is worse? the wolf who cries before eating the lamb or the wolf who does not.”
― Leo Tolstoy
84. “The only absolute knowledge attainable by man is that life is meaningless.”
― Leo Tolstoy
85. “Life did not stop, and one had to live.”
― Leo Tolstoy
86. “Kings are the slaves of history.”
― Leo Tolstoy
87. “Everything depends on upbringing. ”
― Leo Tolstoy
88. “Doctoring her seemed to her as absurd as putting together the pieces of a broken vase. Her heart was broken. Why would they try to cure her with pills and powders?”
― Leo Tolstoy
89. “Pure and complete sorrow is as impossible as pure and complete joy.”
― Leo Tolstoy
90. “He went down trying not to look long at her, as though she were the sun, but he saw her, as one sees the sun, without looking.”
― Leo Tolstoy
91. “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.”
― Leo Tolstoy
92. “To tell the truth is very difficult, and young people are rarely capable of it.”
― Leo Tolstoy
93. “God is the same everywhere.”
― Leo Tolstoy
94. “Here I am alive, and it’s not my fault, so I have to try and get by as best I can without hurting anybody until death takes over.”
― Leo Tolstoy
95. “And you know, there’s less charm in life when you think about death–but it’s more peaceful.”
― Leo Tolstoy
96. “My principal sin is doubt. I doubt everything, and am in doubt most of the time.”
― Leo Tolstoy
97. “He could not be mistaken. There were no other eyes like those in the world. There was only one creature in the world who could concentrate for him all the brightness and meaning of life. It was she. It was Kitty.”
― Leo Tolstoy
98. “As long as there are slaughter houses there will always be battlefields.”
― Leo Tolstoy
99. “The Kingdom of God is Within You,”
― Leo Tolstoy
100. “One must be cunning and wicked in this world.”
― Leo Tolstoy
101. “Historians are like deaf people who go on answering questions that no one has asked them.”
― Leo Tolstoy
102. “I am always with myself, and it is I who am my tormentor.”
― Leo Tolstoy
103. “In the best, the friendliest and simplest relations flattery or praise is necessary, just as grease is necessary to keep wheels turning. ”
― Leo Tolstoy
104. “In the midst of winter, I find within me the invisible summer…”
― Leo Tolstoy
105. “Enough or not…it will have to do”
― Leo Tolstoy
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Wrapping Up
That’s it with the list of the best Leo Tolstoy quotes. If you liked the quotes don’t forget to share them with your reader friends and if you have any questions or quarry let us know by commenting below.
Sourabh Sharma is a hobbyist book reader, Entrepreneur, and a literature student at Delhi University. A blog writer by day and a book reader by night, he is oathed to discuss himself in a third person but can be persuaded to do so from time to time.
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