Leo Tolstoy Quotes on Happiness
Happiness recurs throughout Tolstoy's fiction and moral writing, and the quotes gathered here trace his developing understanding of it. His most famous sentence opens Anna Karenina with the observation that all happy families are alike, while each unhappy family is unhappy in its own way. In War and Peace happiness appears as something to be seized in the living moment, since to love and be loved is named the only reality in the world. But the deepest statement here belongs to Tolstoy's lifelong moral conviction, given early in Family Happiness: there is only one enduring happiness in life, and that is to live for others. For Tolstoy, fleeting personal joy is real but unstable, while a happiness that lasts is found in love and in self-forgetting service. Drawn from the novels and his shorter works, these passages present happiness as bound up with love and with living for others.
Quotes
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“All happy families are alike; each unhappy family is unhappy in its own way.”
Все счастливые семьи похожи друг на друга, каждая несчастливая семья несчастлива по-своему. -
Attributed to Leo Tolstoy:
“If you want to be happy, be.”
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“Seize the moments of happiness, love and be loved! That is the only reality in the world, all else is folly. It is the one thing we are interested in here.”
War and Peace(1865–1867; 1869) | Book IV, Ch. 11 -
“To love life is to love God. Harder and more blessed than all else is to love this life in one's sufferings, in undeserved sufferings.”
War and Peace(1865–1867; 1869) | Bk. XIV, ch. 15 -
“There is only one enduring happiness in life—to live for others.”
Family Happiness(1859) | Part 1, chapter 2 -
“He knew she was there by the joy and fear that overwhelmed his heart.”
Anna Karenina(1875–1877; 1878) | Pt. I, ch. 9