Leo Tolstoy Quotes on Life

Quotes

• “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.

• “Never did Christ utter a single word attesting to a personal resurrection and a life beyond the grave.”

  ...никогда Христос ... ни одним словом не утверждал личное воскресение и бессмертие личности за гробом...

• “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

• “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,

• “He did not, and could not, understand the meaning of words apart from their context. Every word and action of his was the manifestation of an activity unknown to him, which was his life.”

  War and Peace(1865–1867; 1869) | About Platon Karataev in Bk. XII, ch. 13

• “History is the life of nations and of humanity. To seize and put into words, to describe directly the life of humanity or even of a single nation, appears impossible.”

  War and Peace(1865–1867; 1869) | Epilogue II, ch. 1

• “If one has no vanity in this life of ours, there is no sufficient reason for living .”

  The Kreutzer Sonata(1889) | Ch. 23. This is not, as it is often quoted, a stand-alone Tolstoy epigram, but part of the narration by the novella's jealousy-ridden protagonist Pozdnyshev.

• “One can only live while one is intoxicated with life; as soon as one is sober it is impossible not to see that it is all a mere fraud and a stupid fraud!”

  Confession(1882) | Ch. 4 Variant: It is possible to live only as long as life intoxicates us; once we are sober we cannot help seeing that it is all a delusion, a stupid delusion.

• “For man to be able to live he must either not see the infinite, or have such an explanation of the meaning of life as will connect the finite with the infinite.”

  Confession(1882) | Ch. 9

• “Ivan Ilych's life had been most simple and most ordinary and therefore most terrible.”

  The Death of Ivan Ilyich(1886) | Ch. II

• “To be good and lead a good life means to give to others more than one takes from them.”

  The First Step(1892) | Ch. VII

• “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

• “The whole life of the upper classes is a constant inconsistency. The more delicate a man's conscience is, the more painful this contradiction is to him.”

  The Kingdom of God is Within You(1894) | Chapter V , Contradiction Between our Life and our Christian Conscience

• “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.”

  Writings on Civil Disobedience and Nonviolence (1886)

• “There is only one enduring happiness in life—to live for others.”

  Family Happiness(1859) | Part 1, chapter 2