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 Mohandas K. Gandhi, 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
Truth, like gold, is to be obtained not by its growth, but by washing away from it all that is not gold.
—Leo Tolstoy
Topics: Truth, Gold, Growth
One ought only to write when one leaves a piece of one’s own flesh in the inkpot, each time one dips one’s pen.
—Leo Tolstoy
Topics: Writing
The government in which I believe is that which is based on mere moral sanction … the real law lives in the kindness of our hearts. If our hearts are empty, no law or political reform can fill them.
—Leo Tolstoy
Topics: Kindness
It is terrible when people do not know God, but it is worse when people identify as God what is not God.
—Leo Tolstoy
The hero of my tale, whom I love with all the power of my soul, whom I have tried to portray in all its beauty, who has been, is, and will be beautiful, is Truth.
—Leo Tolstoy
Topics: Truth
Faith is the force of life.
—Leo Tolstoy
Topics: Belief, Faith
Pure and complete sorrow is as impossible as pure and complete joy.
—Leo Tolstoy
Topics: Sorrow
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
Topics: Change
The sobs and tears of joy he had not foreseen rose with such force within him that his whole body shook and for a long time prevented him from speaking. Falling on his knees by her bed. He held his wife’s hand to his lips and kissed it, and her hand responded to his kisses with weak movement of finger. Meanwhile, at the foot of the bed, in the midwife’s expert hands, like the flame of a lamp, flickered the life of a human being who had never existed before…
—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
Music is the shorthand of emotion.
—Leo Tolstoy
Topics: Music, Emotions
Art is not a handicraft, it is the transmission of feeling the artist has experienced.
—Leo Tolstoy
Topics: Feelings
The earth is the general and equal possession of all humanity and therefore cannot be the property of individuals.
—Leo Tolstoy
Topics: Property
The kinder and the more thoughtful a person is, the more kindness he can find in other people.
—Leo Tolstoy
Nothing can make our life, or the lives of other people, more beautiful than perpetual kindness.
—Leo Tolstoy
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
Let us forgive each other—only then will we live in peace
—Leo Tolstoy
Topics: Forgiveness
The only thing that we know is that we know nothing and that is the highest flight of human wisdom.
—Leo Tolstoy
Topics: Wisdom
In historic events, the so-called great men are labels giving names to events, and like labels they have but the smallest connection with the event itself. Every act of theirs, which appears to them an act of their own will, is in an historical sense involuntary and is related to the whole course of history and predestined from eternity.
—Leo Tolstoy
Topics: Greatness & Great Things, Greatness
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
He who has a mistaken idea of life, will always have a mistaken idea of death.
—Leo Tolstoy
Topics: Death
Though it is possible to utter words only with the intention to fulfill the will of God, it is very difficult not to think about the impression which they will produce on men and not to form them accordingly. But deeds you can do quite unknown to men, only for God. And such deeds are the greatest joy that a man can experience.
—Leo Tolstoy
Topics: Goodness, Good Deeds, Deeds
A writer is dear and necessary for us only in the measure of which he reveals to us the inner workings of his very soul.
—Leo Tolstoy
Topics: Authors & Writing, Writers, Writing
There is no greatness where simplicity, goodness and truth are absent.
—Leo Tolstoy
Topics: Greatness & Great Things, Simplicity
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
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
I am used to praying when I am alone, thank God. But when I come together with other people, when I need more than ever to pray, I still cannot get used to it.
—Leo Tolstoy
Topics: Prayer
We lost because we told ourselves we lost.
—Leo Tolstoy
Topics: Attitude
Remember then: there is only one time that is important—Now! It is the most important time because it is the only time when we have any power.
—Leo Tolstoy
Topics: The Present
The difference between real material poison and intellectual poison is that most material poison is disgusting to the taste, but intellectual poison, which takes the form of cheap newspapers or bad books, can unfortunately sometimes be attractive.
—Leo Tolstoy
The two most powerful warriors are patience and time.
—Leo Tolstoy
Topics: Time, Patience
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
If you want to be happy, be.
—Leo Tolstoy
Topics: Happiness
Without knowing what I am and why I am here, life is impossible.
—Leo Tolstoy
Topics: Purpose
The greatest truth is the most simple one.
—Leo Tolstoy
Drama, instead of telling us the whole of a man’s life, must place him in such a situation, tie such a knot, that when it is untied, the whole man is visible.
—Leo Tolstoy
Topics: Writing
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 idea shared by many that life is a vale of tears is just as false as the idea shared by the great majority, the idea to which youth and health and riches incline you, that life is a place of entertainment.
—Leo Tolstoy
Topics: Life
The best generals I have known were… stupid or absent-minded men. Not only does a good army commander not need any special qualities, on the contrary he needs the absence of the highest and best human attributes—love, poetry, tenderness, and philosophic inquiring doubt. He should be limited, firmly convinced that what he is doing is very important (otherwise he will not have sufficient patience), and only then will he be a brave leader. God forbid that he should be humane, should love, or pity, or think of what is just and unjust.
—Leo Tolstoy
Topics: The Military
I am convinced that the teaching of the church is in theory a crafty and evil lie, and in practice a concoction of gross superstition and witchcraft
—Leo Tolstoy
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