Great Quotes from Leo Tolstoy
LEV NIKOLAYEVICH TOLSTOY (Russian writer, 1828 – 1910)
Leo Tolstoy was a Russian writer who is regarded as one of the greatest authors of all time. Tolstoy received nominations for the Nobel Prize in Literature every year from 1902 to 1906 and for the Nobel Peace Prize in 1901, 1902, and 1909. That he never won is a major controversy. Tolstoy is best known for the novels War and Peace and Anna Karenina, often cited as pinnacles of realist fiction.
“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.”
“Everyone thinks of changing the world, but no one thinks of changing himself.”
“All happy families are alike; each unhappy family is unhappy in its own way.”
“If you look for perfection, you’ll never be content.”
“We can know only that we know nothing. And that is the highest degree of human wisdom.”
“When you love someone, you love the person as they are, and not as you’d like them to be.”
“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.”
“Everything depends on upbringing.”
“If, then, I were asked for the most important advice I could give, that which I considered to be the most useful to the men of our century, I should simply say: in the name of God, stop a moment, cease your work, look around you.”
“If you want to be happy, be.”
“Rummaging in our souls, we often dig up something that ought to have lain there unnoticed.”
“Wrong does not cease to be wrong because the majority share in it.”
“The two most powerful warriors are patience and time.”
“The changes in our life must come from the impossibility to live otherwise to the demands of our conscience not from our mental resolution to try a new form of life.”
“Be bad, but at least don’t be a liar, a deceiver!”
“There is no greatness where there is not simplicity, goodness, and truth.”
“it’s much better to do good in a way that no one knows anything about it.”
“Happiness does not depend on outward things, but on the way we see them.”
“What counts in making a happy marriage is not so much how compatible you are but how you deal with incompatibility.”
“How can one be well…when one suffers morally?”
“There are no conditions to which a person cannot grow accustomed, especially if he sees that everyone around him lives in the same way.”
“A battle is won by him who is firmly resolved to win it.”
“Government is an association of men who do violence to the rest of us.”
“Debates conceal rather than reveal the truth. Truth is revealed in solitude.”
“If people tell you that you should live your life preparing for the future, do not believe them. Real Life is found only in the present.”
“The key to success in life is using the good thoughts of wise people.”
“Money is a new form of slavery, and distinguishable from the old simply by the fact that it is impersonal – that there is no human relation between master and slave.”
“We lost because we told ourselves we lost.”
“Much unhappiness has come from things left unsaid”
“Upon meeting, you’re judged by your clothes, upon parting you’re judged by your wits.”
“To say that you can love one person all your life is just like saying that one candle will continue burning as long as you live.”
“Boredom: the desire for desires.”
“There is trouble with a wife, but it’s even worse with a woman who is not a wife.”
“Once we’re thrown off our habitual paths, we think all is lost, but it’s only here that the new and the good begins.”
”Memento mori – remember death! These are important words. If we kept in mind that we will soon inevitably die, our lives would be completely different.”
