Leo Tolstoy

The best method for a given teacher is the one which is most familiar to the teacher.

One ought only to write when one leaves a piece of one's own flesh in the inkpot, each time one dips one's pen.

I can't understand how anyone can write without rewriting everything over and over again.

[D]iscipline consists in this, that the men who undergo the instruction and have followed it for a certain time are completely deprived of everything which is precious to a man-of the chief human property, rational freedom-and become submissive, machine-like implements of murder in the hands of their organized hierarchic authorities.

It may be suggested by some books that it is not a sin to kill an animal, but it is written in our own hearts - more clearly than in any book - that we should take pity on animals in the same way as we do on humans.

But the peasants - how do the peasants die?

The artist's mission must not be to produce an irrefutable solution to a problem, but to compel us to love life in all its countless and inexhaustible manifestations.

The teaching of the church, theoretically astute, is a lie in practice and a compound of vulgar superstitions and sorcery.

If once we admit, be it for a single hour or in a single instance, that there can be anything more important than compassion for a fellow human being, then there is no crime against man that we cannot commit with an easy conscience.

Why should I live? Why should I do anything? Is there in life any purpose which the inevitable death that awaits me does not undo and destroy?

Not all of life's roads are set fast, for a man may do this or a man may do that and not even the gods know the mind of a man.

A writer is dear and necessary for us only in the measure of which he reveals to us the inner workings of his very soul.

The improvement of life was only accomplished to the extent to which it was based on a change of consciousness, that is, to the extent to which the law of violence was replaced in men's consciousness by the law of love.

As long as there are slaughterhouses there will be battlefields. A vegetarian diet is the acid test of humanitarianism.

There are always so many conjectures as to the issue of any event that, whatever the outcome, there will always be people to say: 'I said then that it would be so'

Love is God, and to die means that I, a particle of love, shall return to the general and eternal source.

The sobs and tears of joy he had not foreseen rose with such force within him that his whole body shook and for a long time prevented him from speaking. Falling on his knees by her bed. He held his wife's hand to his lips and kissed it, and her hand responded to his kisses with weak movement of finger. Meanwhile, at the foot of the bed, in the midwife's expert hands, like the flame of a lamp, flickered the life of a human being who had never existed before.

Beautiful as seemed mama's face, it became more lovely when she smiled and seemed to enliven everything about her.

Rivers are places that renew our spirit, connect us with our past, and link us directly with the flow and rhythm of the natural world.

Only greatly insolent people establish a religious law which is to be taken for granted by others, which should be accepted by everyone on faith, without any discussion or doubts. Why must people do this?

In order to obtain and hold power, a man must love it.