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
You need feeling, emotion, to create. You can't create out of indifference. - Leo Tolstoy
If you want to be happy, be. - Leo Tolstoy
Music is the shorthand of emotion. - Leo Tolstoy
Historians are like deaf people who go on answering questions that no one has asked them. - Leo Tolstoy
Happy families are all alike; every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way. - Leo Tolstoy
I wanted movement and not a calm course of existence. I wanted excitement and danger and the chance to sacrifice myself for my love. - Leo Tolstoy
He felt now that he was not simply close to her, but that he did not know where he ended and she began. - Leo Tolstoy
If one has no vanity in this life of ours, there is no sufficient reason for living. - Leo Tolstoy
Everything that I understand, I understand only because I love. - Leo Tolstoy
Pure and complete sorrow is about as impossible as pure and complete joy. - Leo Tolstoy
She did not want to talk of her sorrow, but with that sorrow in her heart she could not talk of outside matters. - Leo Tolstoy
What counts in making a happy marriage is not so much how compatible you are, but how you deal with incompatibility. - Leo Tolstoy
Boredom: the desire for desires. - Leo Tolstoy
No one can attain to truth by himself. Only by laying stone on stone with the cooperation of all, by the millions of generations from our forefather Adam to our own times, is that temple reared which is to be a worthy dwelling place of the Great God. - Leo Tolstoy
Muhammad has always been standing higher than the Christianity. He does not consider god as a human being and never makes himself equal to God. Muslims worship nothing except God and Muhammad is his Messenger. There is no any mystery and secret in it. - Leo Tolstoy
Whatever we may say about the soul going to the sky... we know there is no sky but only an atmosphere. - Leo Tolstoy
If a man aspires to a righteous life, his first act of abstinence if from injury to animals. - Leo Tolstoy
Todos pensam em mudar a humanidade e ninguém pensa em mudar a si mesmo. - Leo Tolstoy
Only people who are capable of loving strongly can also suffer great sorrow, but this same necessity of loving serves to counteract their grief and heals them. - Leo Tolstoy
People of limited intelligence are fond of talking about "these days," imagining that they have discovered and appraised the peculiarities of "these days" and that human nature changes with the times. - Leo Tolstoy
Natasha, in her lilac silk dress trimmed with black lace walked, as women can walk, with the more repose and stateliness the greater the pain and shame in her soul. - Leo Tolstoy
Some one dear to one can be loved with human love; but an enemy can only be loved with divine love. - Leo Tolstoy
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
Patience is waiting. Not passively waiting. That is laziness. But to keep going when the going is hard and slow - that is patience. The two most powerful warriors are patience and time. - Leo Tolstoy
All great literature is one of two stories; a man goes on a journey or a stranger comes to town. - Leo Tolstoy
All the horrors of the reign of terror were based on concern for public tranquility. - Leo Tolstoy
Seize the moments of happiness, love and be loved! That is the only reality in the world, all else is folly. It is the one thing we are interested in here. - Leo Tolstoy
I felt how much better and more dignified it was for me to show off the finer side of my soul than of my body. - Leo Tolstoy
And once he had seen this, he could never again see it otherwise, just as we cannot reconstruct an illusion once it has been explained. - Leo Tolstoy
One can live magnificently in this world, if one knows how to work and how to love, to work for the person one loves and to love one’s work. - Leo Tolstoy
But there was another class of people, the real people. To this class they all belonged, and in it the great thing was to be elegant, generous, plucky, gay, to abandon oneself without a blush to every passion, and to laugh at everything else. - Leo Tolstoy
Nice passion is reading - Leo Tolstoy
-Why are you so sad? - Because you speak to me in words and I look at you with feelings. - Leo Tolstoy
One's writing is good only when the intelligence and the imagination are in equilibrium. As soon as one of them overbalances the other, it's all up; you may as well throw it away and begin afresh. - Leo Tolstoy
To love life is to love God. - Leo Tolstoy
Man survives earthquakes, epidemics, the horrors of disease, and agonies of the soul, but all the time his most tormenting tragedy has been, is, and will always be, the tragedy of the bedroom. - Leo Tolstoy
Art is not a handicraft, it is the transmission of feeling the artist has experienced. - Leo Tolstoy
All that day she felt as if she were acting in a theatre with better actors than herself, and that her bad performance was spoiling the whole affair. - Leo Tolstoy
The best stories don't come from "good vs. bad" but "good vs. good. - Leo Tolstoy
Splošni odgovor, ki ga daje življenje na vsa najbolj zapletena in nerešljiva vprašanja je: živi za potrebe dneva, potem boš pozabil. - Leo Tolstoy
She had wit, she had grace, she had beauty; But above all, she had truth. - 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
God gave the day, God gave the strength. - Leo Tolstoy
Happiness is pleasure without regret - Leo Tolstoy
Questions about her feelings, about what has been or might be going on in her soul are non of my business; they are the business of her conscience and belong to religion. - Leo Tolstoy
If I were told that what I shall write will be read in twenty years by the children of today and that they will weep and smile over it and will fall in love with life, I would devote all my life and all my strengths to it. - Leo Tolstoy
It's bad to be unable to stand solitude. - Leo Tolstoy
Wealth and power and life, all that men build up and guard with such effort, is only worth anything through the joy with which it can all be cast away. - Leo Tolstoy
Война не любезность, а самое гадкое дело в жизни, и надо понимать это, и не играть в войну. - Leo Tolstoy
Nietzsche was stupid and abnormal. - Leo Tolstoy
To tell the truth is very difficult, and young people are rarely capable of it. - Leo Tolstoy
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
Crude, immoral, vulgar and senseless. - Leo Tolstoy
One can no more approach people without love than one can approach bees without care. Such is the quality of bees... - Leo Tolstoy
When loving with human love one may pass from love to hatred, but divine love cannot change. - Leo Tolstoy
He was in a fairy kingdom where everything was possible.He looked up at the sky. And the sky was a fairy realm like the earth. It was clearing, and over the tops of the trees clouds were swiftly sailing as if unveiling the stars. - Leo Tolstoy
There are two sides to life for every individual: a personal life, in which his freedom exists in proportion to the abstract nature of his interests, and an elemental life within the swarm of humanity, in which a man inevitably follows laws laid down for him. - Leo Tolstoy
It would be a sin to help you destroy yourself. - Leo Tolstoy
What a strange illusion it is to suppose that beauty is goodness. - Leo Tolstoy
Freethinkers are those who are willing to use their minds without prejudice and without fearing to understand things that clash with their own customs, privileges, or beliefs. This state of mind is not common, but it is essential for right thinking... - Leo Tolstoy
To know God and to live is one and the same thing. God is life. - Leo Tolstoy
We are all brothers, and yet I live by receiving a salary for arraigning, judging and punishing a thief or a prostitute, whose existence is conditioned by the whole consumption of my life. - Leo Tolstoy
If so many men, so many minds, certainly so many hearts, so many kinds of love. - Leo Tolstoy
Everyone thinks of changing the world, but no one thinks of changing himself. - Leo Tolstoy
If only [people] understood that every thought is both false and true! False by one-sidenedness resulting from man's inability to embrace the whole truth, and true as an expression of one fact of human endeavor. - Leo Tolstoy
Just as a painter needs light in order to put the finishing touches to his picture, so I need an inner light, which I feel I never have enough of in the autumn. - Leo Tolstoy
The true meaning of Christ's teaching consists in the recognition of love as the supreme law of life, and therefore not admitting any exceptions. - Leo Tolstoy
Happiness consists in always aspiring perfection, the pause in any level in perfection is the pause of happiness - Leo Tolstoy
The strongest of all warriors are these two -- Time and Patience. - Leo Tolstoy
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
In the name of God, stop a moment, cease your work, look around you. - Leo Tolstoy
Woman, don't you know, is such a subject that however much you study it, it's always perfectly new. - Leo Tolstoy
True life is lived when tiny changes occur. - Leo Tolstoy
oh God! what am I to do if I love nothing but fame and men's esteem? - Leo Tolstoy