Leo Tolstoy Quotes on God
Leo Tolstoy’s late religious writings — A Confession (1882), What I Believe (1884), and The Kingdom of God Is Within You (1894) — gave nineteenth-century Russian thought one of its most influential alternatives to the Russian Orthodox theological mainstream. The central commitments — that the Sermon on the Mount supplies the irreducible essence of Christianity that the institutional churches have systematically obscured, that the kingdom of God is the inner moral transformation of individual lives rather than the eschatological future the churches preach, and that the practical demands of love, non-violence, and the renunciation of coercion follow directly from this recovered teaching — articulate the Tolstoyan Christian anarchism that earned Tolstoy’s excommunication by the Russian Orthodox Synod in 1901. The framework shaped Gandhi’s developing political philosophy through their correspondence, Wittgenstein’s philosophical-religious thought, and the broader twentieth-century radical Christian tradition.
Quotes
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Attributed to Leo Tolstoy:
“The kingdom of God is within you.”
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“The hero of my tale, whom I love with all the power of my soul, whom I have tried to portray in all his beauty, who has been, is, and will be beautiful, is Truth.”
Sevastopol in May (1855), Ch. 16 -
“My Religion (1884), Ch. 8 В чем моя вера?”
...никогда Христос ... ни одним словом не утверждал личное воскресение и бессмертие личности за гробом... -
“My Religion (1884), Ch. 12”
Error is the force that welds men together; truth is communicated to men only by deeds of truth. Only deeds of truth, by introducing light into the conscience of each individual, can dissolve the cohesion of error, and detach men one by one from the mass united together by the cohesion of error. -
“My Religion (1884), as translated in The Human Experience : Contemporary American and Soviet Fiction and Poetry (1989) by the Quaker US/USSR Committee”
I know that my unity with all people cannot be destroyed by national boundaries and government orders. -
“Martin's soul grew very very glad. He crossed himself put on his spectacles, and began reading the Gospel just where it had opened; and at the top of the page he read: I was an hungered, and ye gave me meat; I was thirsty, and ye gave me drink; I was a stranger, and ye took me in. And at the bottom of the page he read: Inasmuch as ye did it unto one of these my brethren even these least, ye did it unto me (Matt. xxv). And Martin understood that his dream had come true; and that the Saviour had really come to him that day, and he had welcomed him.”
Where Love Is, God Is " (1885), also translated as "Where Love is, There God is Also" - (full text online) -
“Where Love Is, God Is " (1885), also translated as "Where Love is, There God is Also" - (full text online)”
Martin's soul grew very very glad. He crossed himself put on his spectacles, and began reading the Gospel just where it had opened; and at the top of the page he read: I was an hungered, and ye gave me meat; I was thirsty, and ye gave me drink; I was a stranger, and ye took me in. And at the bottom of the page he read: Inasmuch as ye did it unto one of these my brethren even these least, ye did it -
“There is one evident, indubitable manifestation of the Divinity, and that is the laws of right which are made known to the world through Revelation.”
Anna Karenina(1875–1877; 1878) | Pt. VIII, ch. 19 -
“Go — take the mother's soul, and learn three truths: Learn What dwells in man, What is not given to man , and What men live by . When thou hast learnt these things, thou shalt return to heaven.”
What Men Live By(1881) | Ch. IV -
“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 .”
What Men Live By(1881) | Ch. XI -
“The only significance of life consists in helping to establish the kingdom of God ; and this can be done only by means of the acknowledgment and profession of the truth by each one of us.”
The Kingdom of God is Within You(1894) | Chapter XII , Conclusion—Repent Ye, for the Kingdom of Heaven is at Hand Variant translation: The sole meaning of life is to serve humanity by contributing to the establishment of the kingdom of God, -
“Quite often a man goes on for years imagining that the religious teaching that had been imparted to him since childhood is still intact, while all the time there is not a trace of it left in him.”
Confession(1882) | Pt. I, ch. 1 -
“The relation of word to thought, and the creation of new concepts is a complex, delicate and enigmatic process unfolding in our soul.”
Pedagogical Writings(1903) | Pegagogicheskie Statli (Pedagogical Writings), pg. 143. -
“Then I remembered the first lesson God had set me: "Learn what dwells in man." And I understood that in man dwells Love! I was glad that God had already begun to show me what He had promised, and I smiled for the first time.”
What Men Live By(1881) | Ch. XI -
“The whole historic existence of mankind is nothing else than the gradual transition from the personal, animal conception of life to the social conception of life, and from the social conception of life to the divine conception of life.”
The Kingdom of God is Within You(1894) | Chapter IV , Christianity Misunderstood by Men of Science