Leo Tolstoy Quotes

I have a wish for world peace and the truth. I would like to see a society that will bring happiness to all life forms. Of course, to the Nazis, I appear a rebel, but to the rebels, I appear like a normal person from Venus.

Truth is a deep kindness that teaches us to be content in our everyday life and share with the people the same happiness.

Jesus was the first socialist, the first to seek a better life for mankind.

Peace is the beauty of life. It is sunshine. It is the smile of a child, the love of a mother, the joy of a father, the togetherness of a family. It is the advancement of man, the victory of a just cause, the triumph of truth.

People who talk about revolution and class struggle without referring explicitly to everyday life, without understanding what is subversive about love and what is positive in the refusal of constraints, such people have a corpse in their mouth.

Today, I choose awareness. I choose to be aware of the beauty of life and living. I choose to be aware of the simple pleasures in life. I choose awareness of joy, awareness of peace, and awareness of love.

"I want to change you" - that is not a revolution. "I'm willing to change" - now this is a revolution.

History will only change when we are able to use the energy of love, just as we use the energy of the wind, the seas, the atom.

At the risk of seeming ridiculous, let me say that the true revolutionary is guided by a great feeling of love. It is impossible to think of a genuine revolutionary lacking this quality.

To me, then, true criticism consists in trying to find out the intrinsic worth of the thing itself, and not in attributing a quality to that thing. You attribute a quality to an environment, to an experience, only when you want to derive something from it, when you want to gain or to have power or happiness. Now this destroys true criticism. Your desire is perverted through attributing values, and therefore you cannot see clearly. Instead of trying to see the flower in its original and entire beauty, you look at it through coloured glasses, and therefore you can never see it as it is.

Love is real, real is love.

Love is a simple thing and a deep thing: it is an act of life and not an illusion. Art is an illusion.

Love doesn't have to be perfect. Even perfect, it is still the best thing there is, for the simple reason that it is the most common and constant truth of all, of all life, all law and order, the very thing which holds everything together, which permits everything to move along in time and be its wonderful or ordinary self.

When we talked about Socrates, we saw how dangerous it could be to appeal to people's reason. With Jesus we see how dangerous it can be to demand unconditional forgiveness. Even in the world of today, we can see how mighty powers can come apart at the seams when confronted with simple demands for peace, love, food for the poor, and amnesty for the enemies of the state.

Life is not complex. We are complex. Life is simple, and the simple thing is the right thing.

And will I tell you that these three lived happily ever after? I will not, for no one ever does. But there was happiness. And they did live.

Love is the goal, life is the journey.

The best things in life are free

To bring about a fundamental, radical revolution, we must begin with ourselves.

Love is just the key to everything.

My idea of happiness is effortless happiness. The things that ground you. For me it's art and cooking, for example, and when I can be with my friends and the people I love and do simple things. That's when I'm the happiest.

Life for my child is simple, and is good.

Here's what I would want for humanity, because this is what I have come to see is true: it's so simple when we listen to people.

Love is, without question life's greatest experience.