35 Leo Tolstoy Quotes that Explore All Life’s Aspects

Without knowing what I am and why I am here, life is impossible.

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.

We lost because we told ourselves we lost.

War on the other hand is such a terrible thing, that no man, especially a Christian man, has the right to assume the responsibility of starting it.

Love provides the person with the purpose of his life. Intellect shows him the means to achieve that purpose.

If you look for perfection, you'll never be content.

I sit on a man's back, choking him and making him carry me, and yet assure myself and others that I am very sorry for him and wish to ease his lot by all possible means - except by getting off his back.

Music is the shorthand of emotion.

There is no greatness where there is no simplicity, goodness and truth.

Art is not a handicraft, it is the transmission of feeling the artist has experienced.

If there existed no external means for dimming their consciences, one-half of the men would at once shoot themselves, because to live contrary to one's reason is a most intolerable state, and all men of our time are in such a state.

The law condemns and punishes only actions within certain definite and narrow limits; it thereby justifies, in a way, all similar actions that lie outside those limits.