Quote

There is nothing more harmful to you than improving only your material, animal side of life. There is nothing more beneficial, both for you and for others, than activity directed to the improvement of your soul.

Leo Tolstoy

Change background

T
T
T

Change font

TAGS & TOPICS

Leo Tolstoy
Age: 82 †
Born: 1828
Born: January 1
Died: 1910
Died: January 1
Diarist
Esperantist
Essayist
Novelist
Opinion Journalist
Pedagogue
Philosopher
Playwright
Prosaist
Writer
Tolstoi
Tolstoy
Lev Nikolaevich
graf Tolstoĭ
Lev Nikolayevich
Count Tolstoy
Count Lev Tolstoy
Leo
graf Tolstoy
Lev
Count Tolstoy
Lev
graf Tolsztoj
Лев Николаевич
c граф Толстой
Lew
graf Tolstoi
Lev Nikolaevich Tolstoy
Lev Tolstoy
Count Leo Tolstoy
Soul
Improvement
Nothing
Material
Life
Materials
Activity
Side
Harmful
Sides
Beneficial
Animal
Improving
Others
Directed

More quotes by Leo Tolstoy

Image
Effort is not a means to lead us to happiness. Effort itself is happiness
Leo Tolstoy
Image
The essence of any religion lies solely in the answer to the question: why do I exist, and what is my relationship to the infinite universe that surrounds me?
Leo Tolstoy
Image
What is important is not the quantity of your knowledge but its quality. You can know many things without knowing the most important.
Leo Tolstoy
Image
A Gentleman is a man who will pay his gambling debts even when he knows he has been cheated.
Leo Tolstoy
Image
The essence of all slavery consists in taking the product of another's labor by force. It is immaterial whether this force be founded upon ownership of the slave or ownership of the money that he must get to live.
Leo Tolstoy
Image
It boils down to this: we should have done with humbug, and let war be war, and not a game ... If there were none of this magnanimity business in warfare, we should never go to war, except for something worth facing certain death for.
Leo Tolstoy
Image
People jump back and forth in pursuit of pleasures only because they see the emptiness of their lives more clearly than they do the emptiness of whichever new entertainment attracts them.
Leo Tolstoy
Image
Life is everything. Life is God. Everything shifts and moves, and this movement is God. And while there is life, there is delight in the self-awareness of the divinity. To love life is to love God. The hardest and most blissful thing is to love this life in one's suffering, in the guiltlessness of suffering.
Leo Tolstoy
Image
Why does man have reason if he can only be influenced by violence?
Leo Tolstoy
Image
A new conception of life cannot be imposed on men it can only be freely assimilated. And it can only be freely assimilated in two ways: one spiritual and internal, the other experimental and external.
Leo Tolstoy
Image
A monkey was carrying two handfuls of peas. One little pea dropped out. He tried to pick it up, and split twenty. He tried to pick up the twenty, and split them all. Then he lost his temper, scattered the peas in all directions and ran away
Leo Tolstoy
Image
Reason unites us, not only with our contemporaries, but with men who lived two thousand years before us, and with those who will live after us.
Leo Tolstoy
Image
but that what was for him the greatest and most cruel injustice appeared to others a quite ordinary occurrence.
Leo Tolstoy
Image
I now understand that my welfare is only possible if I acknowledge my unity with all the people of the world without exception.
Leo Tolstoy
Image
Every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way.
Leo Tolstoy
Image
One may say with one's lips: “I believe that the world was created six thousand years ago” or, “I believe that Jesus flew away into the skies and is sitting on the right hand of the Father” or, “God is One, and also Three” — but no one can believe it, because the words have no sense.
Leo Tolstoy
Image
He sought his former accustomed fear of death and did not find it. Where is it? What death? There was no fear because there was no death. In place of death there was light.
Leo Tolstoy
Image
If you want to be happy, try only to please God, not people.
Leo Tolstoy
Image
Men are so accustomed to maintaining external order by violence that they cannot conceive of life being possible without violence.
Leo Tolstoy
Image
Great works of art are only great because they are accessible and comprehensible to everyone.
Leo Tolstoy