All violence consists in some people forcing others, under threat of suffering or death, to do what they do not want to do.
- Leo Tolstoy Quote

All, everything that I understand, I understand only because I love.
- Leo Tolstoy Quote

Art is not a handicraft, it is the transmission of feeling the artist has experienced.
- Leo Tolstoy Quote

Boredom: the desire for desires.
- Leo Tolstoy Quote

Everyone thinks of changing the world, but no one thinks of changing himself.
- Leo Tolstoy Quote

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.
- Leo Tolstoy Quote

He never chooses an opinion; he just wears whatever happens to be in style.
- Leo Tolstoy Quote

Historians are like deaf people who go on answering questions that no one has asked them.
- Leo Tolstoy Quote

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.
- Leo Tolstoy Quote

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.
- Leo Tolstoy Quote

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.
- Leo Tolstoy Quote

In the name of God, stop a moment, cease your work, look around you.
- Leo Tolstoy Quote

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 Quote

Man lives consciously for himself, but is an unconscious instrument in the attainment of the historic, universal, aims of humanity.
- Leo Tolstoy Quote

One of the first conditions of happiness is that the link between Man and Nature shall not be broken.
- Leo Tolstoy Quote

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.
- Leo Tolstoy Quote

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.
- Leo Tolstoy Quote

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.
- Leo Tolstoy Quote

The sole meaning of life is to serve humanity.
- Leo Tolstoy Quote

The two most powerful warriors are patience and time.
- Leo Tolstoy Quote

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.
- Leo Tolstoy Quote

True life is lived when tiny changes occur.
- Leo Tolstoy Quote

War is so unjust and ugly that all who wage it must try to stifle the voice of conscience within themselves.
- Leo Tolstoy Quote

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.
- Leo Tolstoy Quote

We must not only cease our present desire for the growth of the state, but we must desire its decrease, its weakening.
- Leo Tolstoy Quote

What a strange illusion it is to suppose that beauty is goodness.
- Leo Tolstoy Quote