Leo Tolstoy Quotes from Wisdom-of-the-Wise.com

"If you want to be happy, be."

"Boredom: the desire for desires."

"We lost because we told ourselves we lost."

"To get rid of an enemy one must love him."

"It's hard to love a woman and do anything."

"The sole meaning of life is to serve humanity."

"If you look for perfection, you'll never be content."

"History would be an excellent thing, if only it were true."

"The happiness of men consists in life. And life is in labor."

"Everything comes in time to him who knows how to wait."

"The vocation of every man and woman is to serve other people."

"The strongest of all warriors are these two — Time and Patience."

"God is the infinite ALL. Man is only a finite manifestation of Him."

"It is amazing how complete is the delusion that beauty is goodness."

"Government is an association of men who do violence to the rest of us."

"In the name of God, stop a moment, cease your work, look around you."

"Everyone thinks of changing the world, but no one thinks of changing himself."

"By words one transmits thoughts to another, by means of art, one transmits feelings."

"Which is worse? the wolf who cries before eating the lamb or the wolf who does not."

"All happy families resemble one another, each unhappy family is unhappy in its own way."

"Historians are like deaf people who go on answering questions that no one has asked them."

"When you love someone, you love the person as they are, and not as you'd like them to be."

"All great literature is one of two stories; a man goes on a journey or a stranger comes to town."

"Truth, like gold, is to be obtained not by its growth, but by washing away from it all that is not gold."

"One of the first conditions of happiness is that the link between Man and Nature shall not be broken."

"Seize the moments of happiness, love and be loved! That is the only reality in the world, all else is folly."

"You can love a person dear to you with a human love, but an enemy can only be loved with divine love."

"Man cannot possess anything as long as he fears death. But to him who does not fear it, everything belongs."

"The more is given the less the people will work for themselves, and the less they work the more their poverty will increase."

"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."

"To love life is to love God. Harder and more blessed than all else is to love this life in one's sufferings, in undeserved sufferings."

"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."

"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."

"The only significance of life consists in helping to establish the kingdom of God; and this can be done only by means of the acknowledgment and profession of the truth by each one of us."

"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."

"Love hinders death. 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."

"The most difficult subjects can be explained to the most slow-witted man if he has not formed any idea of them already; but the simplest thing cannot be made clear to the most intelligent man if he is firmly persuaded that he knows already, without a shadow of doubt, what is laid before him."

"It seldom happens that a man changes his life through his habitual reasoning. No matter how fully he may sense the new plans and aims revealed to him by reason, he continues to plod along in old paths until his life becomes frustrating and unbearable, he finally makes the change only when his usual life can no longer be tolerated."

"God is that infinite All of which man knows himself to be a finite part. God alone exists truly. Man manifests Him in time, space and matter. The more God's manifestation in man (life) unites with the manifestations (lives) of other beings, the more man exists. This union with the lives of other beings is accomplished through love."