Leo Tolstoy Quotes

( Lev Nikolayevitch Tolstoy (9 September 1828 – 20 November 1910) was a Russian writer, philosopher and social activist credited as a major influence on Christian anarchism. )

1. All our problems are caused by forgetting what lives within us, and we sell our souls for the “bowl of stew” of bodily satisfactions.
    
2. People try to do all sorts of clever and difficult things to improve life instead of doing the simplest, easiest thing—refusing to participate in activities that make life bad.
    
3. 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.
    
4. God is the infinite ALL. Man is only a finite manifestation of Him.
    
5. You worldly-minded people are most unfortunate! You are surrounded with sorrows and troubles overhead and underfoot and to the right and to the left, and you are enigmas even to yourselves.
    
6. In life, in true life, there can be nothing better than what is. Wanting something different than what is, is blasphemy.
    
7. The most important person is the one you are with in this moment.
    
8. Everything comes in time to him who knows how to wait.
    
9. When the woman showed her love for the children that were not her own, and wept over them, I saw in her the living God, and understood What men live by.
    
10. When a person inflates his own importance, he does not see his own sins; and his sin get bigger right along with him.
     
11. In order to understand, observe, deduce, man must first be conscious of himself as alive.
     
12. Genuine religion is not about speculating about God or the soul or about what happened in the past or will happen in the future; it cares only about one thing—finding out exactly what should or should not be done in this lifetime.
     
13. Love hinders death. Love is life. All, everything that I understand, I understand only because I love. Everything is, everything exists, only because I love. Everything is united by it alone. Love is God, and to die means that I, a particle of love, shall return to the general and eternal source.
     
14. 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.
     
15. We measure the earth, sun, stars, and ocean depths. We burrow into the depths of the earth for gold. We search for rivers and mountains on the moon. We discover new stars and know their magnitudes. We sound the depths of gorges and build clever machines. Each day brings a new invention. What don’t we think of! What can’t we do! But there is something else, the most important thing of all, that we are missing. We do not know exactly what it is. We are like a small child who knows he does not feel well but cannot explain why. We are uneasy, because we know a lot of superfluous facts; but we do not know what is really important—ourselves.