Leo Tolstoy > Quotes

“The only absolute knowledge attainable by man is that life is meaningless.”
― Leo Tolstoy, A Confession

“Kings are the slaves of history.”
― Leo Tolstoy, War and Peace

“Happiness is an allegory, unhappiness a story.”
― Leo Tolstoy

“Music is the shorthand of emotion”
― Leo Tolstoy

“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, Anna Karenina

“Which is worse? the wolf who cries before eating the lamb or the wolf who does not.”
― Leo Tolstoy

“Life did not stop, and one had to live.”
― Leo Tolstoy, War and Peace

“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

“Everything depends on upbringing. ”
― Leo Tolstoy, War and Peace

“Pure and complete sorrow is as impossible as pure and complete joy.”
― Leo Tolstoy, War and Peace

“A Frenchman's self-assurance stems from his belief that he is mentally and physically irresistibly fascinating to both men and women. An Englishman's self-assurance is founded on his being a citizen of the best organized state in the world and on the fact that, as an Englishman, he always knows what to do, and that whatever he does as an Englishman is unquestionably correct. An Italian is self-assured because he is excitable and easily forgets. A Russian is self-assured simply because he knows nothing and does not want to know anything, since he does not believe in the possibility of knowing anything fully.”
― Leo Tolstoy, War and Peace

“God is the same everywhere.”
― Leo Tolstoy, War and Peace

“To tell the truth is very difficult, and young people are rarely capable of it.”
― Leo Tolstoy

“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, Anna Karenina

“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, Anna Karenina

“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, Anna Karenina

“Morning or night, Friday or Sunday, made no difference, everything was the same: the gnawing, excruciating, incessant pain; that awareness of life irrevocably passing but not yet gone; that dreadful, loathsome death, the only reality, relentlessly closing in on him; and that same endless lie. What did days, weeks, or hours matter?”
― Leo Tolstoy, The Death of Ivan Ilych

“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, Война и мир

“And you know, there's less charm in life when you think about death--but it's more peaceful.”
― Leo Tolstoy, Anna Karenina

“As long as there are slaughter houses there will always be battlefields.”
― Leo Tolstoy, What I Believe

“My principal sin is doubt. I doubt everything, and am in doubt most of the time.”
― Leo Tolstoy, Anna Karenina

“There can be no peace for us, only misery, and the greatest happiness.”
― Leo Tolstoy, Anna Karenina

“اختراع مائة نظرية أسهل مائة مرة من تطبيق نظرية واحدة”
― ليو تولستوي

“One must be cunning and wicked in this world.”
― Leo Tolstoy, War and Peace

“The Kingdom of God is Within You,”
― Leo Tolstoy, Anna Karenina

“He looked at her as a man looks at a faded flower he has gathered, with difficulty recognizing in it the beauty for which he picked and ruined it. And in spite of this he felt that then, when his love was stronger, he could, if he had greatly wished it, have torn that love out of his heart; but now when as at that moment it seemed to him he felt no love for her, he knew that what bound him to her could not be broken.”
― Leo Tolstoy, Anna Karenina

“Music makes me forget my real situation. It transports me into a state which is not my own. Under the influence of music I really seem to feel what I do not feel, to understand what I do not understand, to have powers which I cannot have. Music seems to me to act like yawning or laughter; I have no desire to sleep, but I yawn when I see others yawn; with no reason to laugh, I laugh when I hear others laugh. And music transports me immediately into the condition of soul in which he who wrote the music found himself at that time.”
― Leo Tolstoy, The Kreutzer Sonata

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

“In the midst of winter, I find within me the invisible summer...”
― Leo Tolstoy, The Kingdom of God Is Within You

“Enough or not...it will have to do”
― Leo Tolstoy, Anna Karenina