Inspirational Quotations

Inspirational Quotes by Leo Tolstoy (Russian Novelist)

Count Lev Nikolayevich Tolstoy (1828–1910,) usually referred to in English as Leo Tolstoy, was a Russian novelist and social reformer. He is the author of two of the greatest works of fiction ever written: War and Peace (1869,) an epic novel of the Napoleonic invasion and the lives of three aristocratic families, and Anna Karenina (1877,) the tale of a married woman’s passion for a young officer and her tragic fate.

Born into Russia’s nobility, Tolstoy was an excellent novelist with unsurpassed creative abilities. However, from 1880, Tolstoy’s constant concern with moral inquiries advanced into a spiritual crisis, which led to radical changes in his life. He abandoned his literary ambitions, believing them to be incompatible with his deepest convictions. He transformed himself into a prophetic philosopher who tried to follow a comprehensive vision of primitive Christian austerity. He lived in great simplicity, renouncing property and the happiness of family life, engaging in manual labor, and striving for the relief of social distress during the Russian famine of 1891–92.

All of Tolstoy’s later works were on moral and religious subjects, and his output was substantial. His writings on the virtues of nonviolent resistance, spirituality, and anarchism got him excommunicated from the Orthodox Church, and he then started writing against organized religion. He was a significant influence in the developments of Christian anarchism, nonviolent resistance movements such as those of as Mahātma Gāndhī, Martin Luther King, Jr., and James Bevel.

The foremost fictional works bearing the imprint of changes in Tolstoy’s philosophy are The Death of Ivan Ilyich (1886,) The Kreutzer Sonata (1891,) Master and Man (1895,) Resurrection (1899,) and Hadji Murad (1904.)

Tolstoy is also the author of numerous stories for children. His collections of folk tales for peasant children were simple in structure and style and contained clear morals. His most famous fairy tale, “The Three Bears,” is an adaptation of the fairy tale “Goldilocks.” He opened several schools for the education of peasants but quickly closed them down after harassment by the secret police.

Tolstoy declined the first Nobel Prize in Literature concerned that the prize money would corrupt him and unjustifiably complicate his life.

More: Wikipedia • READ: Works by Leo Tolstoy

Some mathematician has said pleasure lies not in discovering truth, but in seeking it.
—Leo Tolstoy
Topics: Pleasure

True life is lived when tiny changes occur.
—Leo Tolstoy
Topics: Change

The law condemns and punishes only actions within certain definite and narrow limits; it thereby justifies, in a way, all similar actions that lie outside those limits.
—Leo Tolstoy
Topics: Justice

Pure and complete sorrow is as impossible as pure and complete joy.
—Leo Tolstoy
Topics: Sorrow

The greatest truth is the most simple one.
—Leo Tolstoy

Thou shall not kill does not apply to murder of one’s own kind only, but to all living beings; and this Commandment was inscribed in the human breast long before it was proclaimed from Sinai.
—Leo Tolstoy
Topics: Vegetarianism

I know that my unity with all people cannot be destroyed by national boundaries and government orders.
—Leo Tolstoy
Topics: Unity

There are no conditions to which a man cannot become accustomed.
—Leo Tolstoy

Love is real only when a person can sacrifice himself for another person. Only when a person forgets himself for the sake of another, and lives for another creature, only this kind of love can be called true love, and only in this love do we see the blessing and reward of life. This is the foundation of the world.
—Leo Tolstoy

Hypocrisy in anything whatever may deceive the cleverest and most penetrating man, but the least wide-awake of children recognizes it, and is revolted by it, however ingeniously it may be disguised.
—Leo Tolstoy
Topics: Hypocrisy

A battle is won by him who is firmly resolved to win it.
—Leo Tolstoy

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, it will do more than if you paralyze it by encumbering it with remedies.
—Leo Tolstoy
Topics: Body, Health

The subject of history is the life of peoples and of humanity. To catch and pin down in words—that is, to describe directly the life, not only of humanity, but even of a single people, appears to be impossible.
—Leo Tolstoy
Topics: History

Happy families are all alike; every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way.
—Leo Tolstoy
Topics: Unhappiness, Family

He who has a mistaken idea of life, will always have a mistaken idea of death.
—Leo Tolstoy
Topics: Death

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
Topics: Health, Vegetarianism

What a strange illusion it is to suppose that beauty is goodness.
—Leo Tolstoy
Topics: Goodness

Life is only this place, this time, and these people right here and now.
—Leo Tolstoy
Topics: The Present

To tell the truth is the same as to be a good tailor, or to be a good farmer, or to write beautifully. To be good at any activity requires practice: no matter how hard you try, you cannot do naturally what you have not done repeatedly. In order to get accustomed to speaking the truth, you should tell only the truth, even in the smallest of things.
—Leo Tolstoy

It’s too easy to criticize a man when he’s out of favor, and to make him shoulder the blame for everybody else’s mistakes.
—Leo Tolstoy
Topics: Criticism

Historians are like deaf people who go on answering questions that no one has asked them.
—Leo Tolstoy
Topics: Questions

Happiness does not depend on outward things, but on the way we see them.
—Leo Tolstoy
Topics: Business, Attitude, Belief, Adversity, Happiness

You should respond with kindness toward evil done to you, and you will destroy in an evil person that pleasure which he derives from evil.
—Leo Tolstoy

Without knowing what I am and why I am here, life is impossible.
—Leo Tolstoy
Topics: Purpose

The recognition of the sanctity of the life of every man is the first and only basis of all morality.
—Leo Tolstoy
Topics: Ethics

If a man earnestly seeks a righteous life, his first act of abstinence is from animal food.
—Leo Tolstoy

Joy can only be real only if people look upon their life as a service, and have a definite object in life outside themselves and their personal happiness.
—Leo Tolstoy
Topics: Service

In quiet and untroubled times it seems to every administrator that it is only by his efforts that the whole population under his rule is kept going, and in this consciousness of being indispensable every administrator finds the chief reward of his labor and efforts. While the sea of history remains calm the ruler-administrator in his frail bark, holding on with a boat hook to the ship of the people and himself moving, naturally imagines that his efforts move the ship he is holding on to. But as soon as a storm arises and the sea begins to heave and the ship to move, such a delusion is no longer possible. The ship moves independently with its own enormous motion, the boat hook no longer reaches the moving vessel, and suddenly the administrator, instead of appearing a ruler and a source of power, becomes an insignificant, useless, feeble man.
—Leo Tolstoy
Topics: Government

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
Topics: Art, Arts, Artists

If we admit that human life can be ruled by reason, then all possibility of life is destroyed.
—Leo Tolstoy

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