"Everyone thinks of changing the world, but no one thinks of changing himself. "
— Leo Tolstoy

"In the name of God, stop a moment, cease your work, look around you.""
— Leo Tolstoy

"All happy families are alike; each unhappy family is unhappy in its own way."
— Leo Tolstoy (Anna Karenina)

"Only people who are capable of loving strongly can also suffer great sorrow, but this same necessity of loving serves to counteract their grief and heals them."
— Leo Tolstoy

"If you want to be happy, be."
— Leo Tolstoy

"It is amazing how complete is the delusion that beauty is goodness."
— Leo Tolstoy

"Freethinkers are those who are willing to use their minds without prejudice and without fearing to understand things that clash with their own customs, privileges, or beliefs. This state of mind is not common, but it is essential for right thinking..."
— Leo Tolstoy

"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."
— Leo Tolstoy

"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

"I think... if it is true that
there are as many minds as there
are heads, then there are as many
kinds of love as there are hearts."
— Leo Tolstoy (Anna Karenina)

"If everyone fought for their own convictions there would be no war."
— Leo Tolstoy (War and Peace)

"Happiness does not depend on outward things, but on the way we see them."
— Leo Tolstoy

"Nothing is so necessary for a young man as the company of intelligent women."
— Leo Tolstoy (War and Peace)

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

"True life is lived when tiny changes occur."
— Leo Tolstoy

""I sit on a man's back choking him and making him carry me, and yet assure myself and others that i am sorry for him and wish to lighten his load by all means possible....except by getting off his back."
— Leo Tolstoy

"Tuhan tahu, tapi menunggu ..... "
— Leo Tolstoy

"Historians are like deaf people who go on answering questions that no one has asked them."
— Leo Tolstoy

"He stepped down, trying not to look long at her, as if she were the sun, yet he saw her, like the sun, even without looking."
— Leo Tolstoy (Anna Karenina)

"Boredom: the desire for desires."
— Leo Tolstoy

"The business of art lies just in this, -- to make that understood and felt which, in the form of an argument, might be incomprehensible and inaccessible."
— Leo Tolstoy (What Is Art?)

"We can know only that we know nothing. And that is the highest degree of human wisdom."
— Leo Tolstoy (War and Peace)

"A man is like a fraction whose numerator is what he is and whose denominator is what he thinks of himself. The larger the denominator, the smaller the fraction."
— Leo Tolstoy

"Which is worse? the wolf who cries before eating the lamb or the wolf who does not."
— Leo Tolstoy

"If you want to be happy, you have to believe in the possibility of happiness...Let the dead bury the dead, but while ever there is life,you must live and be happy."
— Leo Tolstoy (War and Peace)

"Respect was invented to cover the empty place where love should be."
— Leo Tolstoy (Anna Karenina)

"To get rid of an enemy one must love him. "
— Leo Tolstoy

"If you look for perfection, you'll never be content."
— Leo Tolstoy (Anna Karenina)

"…rest, nature, books, music…such is my idea of happiness…"
— Leo Tolstoy

"he was afraid of defiling the love which filled his soul."
— Leo Tolstoy (Anna Karenina)

"Every lie is a poison; there are no harmless lies. Only the truth is safe. Only the truth gives me consolation - it is the one unbreakable diamond."
— Leo Tolstoy

"Music is the shorthand of emotion"
— Leo Tolstoy

"…[I]f they hadn’t both been pretending, but had had what is called a heart-to-heart talk, that is, simply told each other just what they were thinking and feeling, then they would just have looked into each other’s eyes, and Constantine would only have said: ‘You’re dying, dying, dying!’ – while Nicholas would simply have replied: ‘I know I’m dying, but I’m afraid, afraid, afraid!’ That’s all they would have said if they’d been talking straight from the heart. But it was impossible to live that way, so Levin tried to do what he’d been trying to do all his life without being able to, what a great many people could do so well, as he observed, and without which life was impossible: he tried to say something different from what he thought, and he always felt it came out false, that his brother caught him out and was irritated by it."
— Leo Tolstoy (Anna Karenina)

"You can love a person dear to you with a human love, but an enemy can only be loved with divine love."
— Leo Tolstoy (War and Peace)

"Human science fragments everything in order to understand it, kills everything in order to examine it. "
— Leo Tolstoy (War and Peace)

"If we admit that human life can be ruled by reason, then all possibility of life is destroyed."
— Leo Tolstoy

"Rummaging in our souls, we often dig up something that ought to have lain there unnoticed. "
— Leo Tolstoy (Anna Karenina)

"Yes, love, ...but not the love that loves for something, to gain something, or because of something, but that love that I felt for the first time, when dying, I saw my enemy and yet loved him. I knew that feeling of love which is the essence of the soul, for which no object is needed. And I know that blissful feeling now too. To love one's neighbours; to love one's enemies. To love everything - to Love God in all His manifestations. Some one dear to one can be loved with human love; but an enemy can only be loved with divine love. And that was why I felt such joy when I felt that I loved that man. What happened to him? Is he alive? ...Loving with human love, one may pass from love to hatred; but divine love cannot change. Nothing, not even death, can shatter it. It is the very nature of the soul. And how many people I have hated in my life. And of all people none I have loved and hated more than her.... If it were only possible for me to see her once more... once, looking into those eyes to say..."
— Leo Tolstoy (War and Peace)

"Love those you hate you."
— Leo Tolstoy (Anna Karenina)

"When you love someone, you love the person as they are, and not as you'd like them to be."
— Leo Tolstoy

"They've got no idea what happiness is, they don't know that without this love there is no happiness or unhappiness for us--there is no life."
— Leo Tolstoy (Anna Karenina)

"Instead of going to Paris to attend lectures, go to the public library, and you won't come out for twenty years, if you really wish to learn."
— Leo Tolstoy

"Every man and every living creature has a sacred right to the gladness of springtime."
— Leo Tolstoy (Resurrection)

"Is it really possible to tell someone else what one feels?"
— Leo Tolstoy (Anna Karenina)

"Man cannot possess anything as long as he fears death. But to him who does not fear it, everything belongs. If there was no suffering, man would not know his limits, would not know himself. "
— Leo Tolstoy (War and Peace)

"The best stories don't come from "good vs. bad" but "good vs. good.""
— Leo Tolstoy

"I have lived through much, and now I think I have found what is needed for happiness. A quiet secluded life in the country, with the possibility of being useful to people to whom it is easy to do good, and who are not accustomed to have it done to them; then work which one hopes may be of some use; then rest, nature, books, music, love for one’s neighbor — such is my idea of happiness."
— Leo Tolstoy (Family Happiness and Other Stories)

"To tell the truth is very difficult, and young people are rarely capable of it."
— Leo Tolstoy

"If so many men, so many minds, certainly so many hearts, so many kinds of love."
— Leo Tolstoy

"I often think that men don't understand what is noble and what is ignorant, though they always talk about it."
— Leo Tolstoy (Anna Karenina)