30 Meaningful Quotes By The Christian Anarchist And Pacifist Leo Tolstoy

Leo Tolstoy (Lev Nikolayevich Tolstoy, 1828-1910) was a Russian novelist regarded as one of the greatest of all time.

He is best known for War and Peace (1869) and Anna Karenina (1877). He first achieved literary acclaim in his 20s with his semi-autobiographical trilogy, Childhood, Boyhood, and Youth (1852–1856), and Sevastopol Sketches (1855), based upon his experiences in the Crimean War. Tolstoy's fiction includes dozens of short stories and several novellas such as The Death of Ivan Ilyich, Family Happiness, and Hadji Murad. He also wrote plays and numerous philosophical essays.

Leo Tolstoy experienced a profound moral crisis in the 1870s, followed by what he regarded as an equally profound spiritual awakening, as outlined in his non-fiction work A Confession. His literal interpretation of the ethical teachings of Jesus, centering on the Sermon on the Mount, caused him to become a fervent Christian anarchist and pacifist. His new-found asceticism and determination to renounce his considerable wealth tipped his marriage into bitter turmoil, which continued right up to his death at the age of 82 in the waiting room of an, until then, obscure Russian railway station.

Tolstoy's ideas on nonviolent resistance, expressed in such works as The Kingdom of God Is Within You, were to have a profound impact on such pivotal 20th-century figures as Mohandas Gandhi, Martin Luther King Jr., and James Bevel.

Below you can read 30 meaningful quotes which you can also find in his books:

1) “All happy families are alike; each unhappy family is unhappy in its own way.” (Anna Karenina)

2) “If you look for perfection, you'll never be content.” (Anna Karenina)

3) “I think... if it is true that
there are as many minds as there
are heads, then there are as many
kinds of love as there are hearts.” (Anna Karenina)

4) “Respect was invented to cover the empty place where love should be.” (Anna Karenina)

5) “He stepped down, trying not to look long at her, as if she were the sun, yet he saw her, like the sun, even without looking.” (Anna Karenina)

6) “Spring is the time of plans and projects.” (Anna Karenina)

7) “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.” (Essays, Letters and Miscellanies)

8) “Wrong does not cease to be wrong because the majority share in it.” (A Confession)

9) “It is amazing how complete is the delusion that beauty is goodness.” (The Kreutzer Sonata)

10) “If everyone fought for their own convictions there would be no war.” (War and Peace)

11) “We can know only that we know nothing. And that is the highest degree of human wisdom.” (War and Peace)

12) “Nothing is so necessary for a young man as the company of intelligent women.” (War and Peace)

13) “A quiet secluded life in the country, with the possibility of being useful to people to whom it is easy to do good, and who are not accustomed to have it done to them; then work which one hopes may be of some use; then rest, nature, books, music, love for one's neighbor — such is my idea of happiness.” (Family Happiness)

14) “What counts in making a happy marriage is not so much how compatible you are but how you deal with incompatibility.”

15) “True life is lived when tiny changes occur.”

16) “All great literature is one of two stories; a man goes on a journey or a stranger comes to town.”

17) “There is no greatness where there is not simplicity, goodness, and truth.”

18) “Happiness does not depend on outward things, but on the way we see them.”

19) “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.”

20) “Everyone thinks of changing the world, but no one thinks of changing himself.”

21) “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.”

22) “If you want to be happy, be.”

23) “In the name of God, stop a moment, cease your work, look around you.”

24) “Is it really possible to tell someone else what one feels?” (Anna Karenina)

25) “When you love someone, you love the person as they are, and not as you'd like them to be.”

26) “Rummaging in our souls, we often dig up something that ought to have lain there unnoticed. ”

27) “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...”

28) “The two most powerful warriors are patience and time.”

29) “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.”

30) “Boredom: the desire for desires.”

Leo Tolstoy's Books:

• Anna Karenina
• Essays, Letters and Miscellanies
• A Confession
• The Kreutzer Sonata
• War and Peace
• Family Happiness
• The Kingdom of God Is Within You

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