Leo Tolstoy Quotes

The most important questions in life can never be answered by anyone except oneself.

I learned the significance of my own insignificant life.

Each man must look to himself to teach him the meaning of life. It is not something discovered: it is something molded.

It's not about finding a home so much as finding yourself.

The longest journey is the journey inwards. Of him who has chosen his destiny, Who has started upon his quest for the source of his being.

It's something that I had been pushing down my whole life. The search for meaning, I guess, the whispering of the soul.

I spent many years seeking self-awareness and wondering what I should be doing on this planet.

You've got to find yourself first. Everything else'll follow.

Life is a constant challenge to know oneself.

In my search to find myself, I’d found so much more. I knew now why I wanted to live. I understood love. I had found it.

Everyone now knows how to find the meaning of life within himself.

To study the Way is to study the self. To study the self is to forget the self.

It is more important to know who you are than where you are going, for where you are going will change as the world around you changes.

None of us have much idea where we are. Perhaps all our lives are too concerned with where, and not enough with who.

Whether a man lives or dies in vain can be measured only by the way he faces his own problems, by the success or failure of the inner conflict within his own soul. And of this no one may know save God.

Two tasks at the beginning of your life: to narrow your orbit more and more, and ever and again to check whether you are not in hiding somewhere outside your orbit.

The way to recover the meaning of life and the worthwhileness of life is to recover the power of experience, to have impulse voices from within, and to be able to hear these impulse voices from within — and make the point: This can be done.

The searching for our selves is the most agonizing, isn't it? - and yet the most stimulating - and one simply cannot escape it.

For me, life isn't about being recognized or having everyone know who I am. That's not why I'm here. To me, my foundation is the most important thing I do or have ever done. That's what my life is about.

All of us, at some moment, have had a vision of our existence as something unique, untransferable and very precious. This revelation almost always takes place during adolescence.

I, at the age of 17 or 18 as a medical student, suddenly came up against a problem: 'What am I? What is the meaning of my existence as I experience it?'

Every character is asking: 'What's my place? Why am I here? I don't want the answer to be 'Just because.' You find your own purpose. Each finds the reason to be here and how to contribute.

In my book, I was trying to get into my own soul.

In the last analysis, the individual person is responsible for living his own life and for 'finding himself.' If he persists in shifting his responsibility to somebody else, he fails to find out the meaning of his own existence.

For this is the journey that men and women make, to find themselves. If they fail in this, it doesn't matter much else what they find.