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
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
The sole meaning of life is to serve humanity.
—Leo Tolstoy
Topics: Meaning, Humanity
He who has a mistaken idea of life, will always have a mistaken idea of death.
—Leo Tolstoy
Topics: Death
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
I am sure that nothing has such a decisive influence upon a man’s course as his personal appearance, and not so much his appearance as his belief in its attractiveness or unattractiveness.
—Leo Tolstoy
Topics: Attitude
The two most powerful warriors are patience and time.
—Leo Tolstoy
Topics: Patience, Time
But the peasants—how do the peasants die?
—Leo Tolstoy
Topics: Dying, Death
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
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
History would be an excellent thing if only it were true.
—Leo Tolstoy
The only thing that we know is that we know nothing and that is the highest flight of human wisdom.
—Leo Tolstoy
Topics: Wisdom
I am always with myself and it is I who am my tormentor.
—Leo Tolstoy
Topics: Self-Control, Control
A man is like a fraction whose numerator is what he is and whose denominator is what he thinks of himself. The larger the denominator the smaller the fraction.
—Leo Tolstoy
Topics: Thoughts, Thinking, Thought
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
Art is not a handicraft, it is the transmission of feeling the artist has experienced.
—Leo Tolstoy
Topics: Feelings
If a man earnestly seeks a righteous life, his first act of abstinence is from animal food.
—Leo Tolstoy
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: Writers, Writing, Authors & Writing
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
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
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
It is amazing how complete is the delusion that beauty is goodness.
—Leo Tolstoy
Topics: Beauty
The earth is the general and equal possession of all humanity and therefore cannot be the property of individuals.
—Leo Tolstoy
Topics: Property
There is one evident, indubitable manifestation of the Divinity, and that is the laws of right which are made known to the world through Revelation.
—Leo Tolstoy
Topics: Law
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
Patriotism in its simplest, clearest and most indubitable signification is nothing else but a means of obtaining for the rulers their ambitions and covetous desires, and for the ruled the abdication of human dignity, reason, conscience, and a slavish enthrallment to those in power.
—Leo Tolstoy
Topics: Patriotism
Nothing can make our life, or the lives of other people, more beautiful than perpetual kindness.
—Leo Tolstoy
Government is an association of men who do violence to the rest of us
—Leo Tolstoy
Topics: Government
We should show life neither as it is nor as it ought to be, but only as we see it in our dreams.
—Leo Tolstoy
Topics: Dreams
Happy families are all alike; every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way.
—Leo Tolstoy
Topics: Family, Unhappiness
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
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