Count Lev Nikolayevich Tolstoy (1828–1910,) usually referred to in English as Leo Tolstoy, was a Russian novelist and social reformer. He is the author of two of the greatest works of fiction ever written: War and Peace (1869,) an epic novel of the Napoleonic invasion and the lives of three aristocratic families, and Anna Karenina (1877,) the tale of a married woman’s passion for a young officer and her tragic fate.
Born into Russia’s nobility, Tolstoy was a superlative novelist with unsurpassed creative abilities. However, from 1880, Tolstoy’s constant concern with moral inquiries advanced into a spiritual crisis, which led to radical changes in his life. He abandoned his literary ambitions, believing them to be incompatible with his deepest convictions. He transformed himself into a prophetic philosopher who tried to follow a comprehensive vision of primitive Christian austerity. He lived in great simplicity, renouncing property and the happiness of family life, engaging in manual labor, and striving for the relief of social distress during the Russian famine of 1891–92.
All of Tolstoy’s later works were on moral and religious subjects, and his output was substantial. His writings on the virtues of non-violent resistance, spirituality, and anarchism got him excommunicated from the Orthodox Church, and he then started writing against organized religion.
The foremost fictional works bearing the imprint of changes in Tolstoy’s personal philosophy are The Death of Ivan Ilyich (1886,) The Kreutzer Sonata (1891,) Master and Man (1895,) Resurrection (1899,) and Hadji Murad (1904.)
Tolstoy is also the author of numerous stories for children. His collections of folk tales for peasant children were simple in structure and style and contained clear morals. His most famous fairy tale, “The Three Bears,” is an adaptation of “Goldilocks.” He opened several schools for the education of peasants but quickly closed them down after harassment by the secret police.
Tolstoy declined the first Nobel Prize in Literature concerned that the prize money would corrupt him and unjustifiably complicate his life.
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The idea shared by many that life is a vale of tears is just as false as the idea shared by the great majority, the idea to which youth and health and riches incline you, that life is a place of entertainment.
—Leo Tolstoy
Topics: Life
There is only one time that is important — NOW! It is the most important time because it is the only time that we have any power.
—Leo Tolstoy
The religious superstition is encouraged by means of the institution of churches, processions, monuments, festivities….The so-called clergy stupefy the masses….They befog the people and keep them in an eternal condition of stupefaction.
—Leo Tolstoy
Topics: Religion
Historians are like deaf people who go on answering questions that no one has asked them.
—Leo Tolstoy
Topics: Questions
The greatest truth is the most simple one.
—Leo Tolstoy
Everyone thinks of changing the world, but no one thinks of changing himself.
—Leo Tolstoy
There are two different states of human existence: first, to live without thinking of death; second, to live with the thought that you approach death with every hour of your life.
—Leo Tolstoy
In historic events, the so-called great men are labels giving names to events, and like labels they have but the smallest connection with the event itself. Every act of theirs, which appears to them an act of their own will, is in an historical sense involuntary and is related to the whole course of history and predestined from eternity.
—Leo Tolstoy
Topics: Greatness & Great Things, Greatness
Happy families are all alike; every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way.
—Leo Tolstoy
Topics: Unhappiness, Family
To tell the truth is the same as to be a good tailor, or to be a good farmer, or to write beautifully. To be good at any activity requires practice: no matter how hard you try, you cannot do naturally what you have not done repeatedly. In order to get accustomed to speaking the truth, you should tell only the truth, even in the smallest of things.
—Leo Tolstoy
There is no greatness where simplicity, goodness and truth are absent.
—Leo Tolstoy
Topics: Simplicity, Greatness & Great Things
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.
—Leo Tolstoy
Joy can only be real only if people look upon their life as a service, and have a definite object in life outside themselves and their personal happiness.
—Leo Tolstoy
Topics: Service
It’s too easy to criticize a man when he’s out of favor, and to make him shoulder the blame for everybody else’s mistakes.
—Leo Tolstoy
Topics: Criticism
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 we admit that human life can be ruled by reason, then all possibility of life is destroyed.
—Leo Tolstoy
The two most powerful warriors are patience and time.
—Leo Tolstoy
Topics: Patience, Time
He never chooses an opinion; he just wears whatever happens to be in style.
—Leo Tolstoy
Topics: Fashion, Originality
A battle is won by him who is firmly resolved to win it.
—Leo Tolstoy
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
Truth, like gold, is to be obtained not by its growth, but by washing away from it all that is not gold.
—Leo Tolstoy
Topics: Truth, Growth
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