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.
Leo Tolstoy

Man lives consciously for himself, but is an unconscious instrument in the attainment of the historic, universal, aims of humanity.
Leo Tolstoy

Music is the shorthand of emotion.
Leo Tolstoy

Nietzsche was stupid and abnormal.
Leo Tolstoy

One of the first conditions of happiness is that the link between Man and Nature shall not be broken.
Leo Tolstoy

Our body is a machine for living. It is organized for that, it is its nature. Let life go on in it unhindered and let it defend itself.
Leo Tolstoy

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.
Leo Tolstoy

The chief difference between words and deeds is that words are always intended for men for their approbation, but deeds can be done only for God.
Leo Tolstoy

The greater the state, the more wrong and cruel its patriotism, and the greater is the sum of suffering upon which its power is founded.
Leo Tolstoy

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.
Leo Tolstoy

The sole meaning of life is to serve humanity.
Leo Tolstoy

The two most powerful warriors are patience and time.
Leo Tolstoy

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

To say that a work of art is good, but incomprehensible to the majority of men, is the same as saying of some kind of food that it is very good but that most people can't eat it.
Leo Tolstoy

True life is lived when tiny changes occur.
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

War is so unjust and ugly that all who wage it must try to stifle the voice of conscience within themselves.
Leo Tolstoy

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.
Leo Tolstoy

We lost because we told ourselves we lost.
Leo Tolstoy

We must not only cease our present desire for the growth of the state, but we must desire its decrease, its weakening.
Leo Tolstoy