Leo Tolstoy

The photographs taken at Yasnaya Polyana in my later years show a peasant — or a man dressed as one. I wore peasant clothes, worked in the fields, made my own boots. My family found it embarrassing. The peasants found it slightly strange. I found it necessary.

I had written two of the greatest novels in the Russian language and was known across the world....

I know that most men, including those at ease with problems of the greatest complexity, can seldom accept even the simplest and most obvious truth if it obliges them to admit the falsity of conclusions which they have delighted in explaining to colleagues and which they have woven thread by thread into their lives.

A man can live and be healthy without killing animals for food; therefore, if he eats meat, he participates in taking animal life for the sake of his appetite. I became a vegetarian not for health but because I could not reconcile the killing with my belief in non-violence.

The most important thing in the world is not where we stand but in what direction we are moving. A man can live and be healthy without killing animals for food; therefore, if he eats meat, he participates in taking animal life for the sake of his appetite.

Everyone thinks of changing the world, but no one thinks of changing himself. I have spent my life demonstrating this. I wrote Anna Karenina and War and Peace — novels praised across Europe. I owned Yasnaya Polyana, one of the great estates of Russia. And then I concluded that I had been living entirely wrong: that wealth was violence, that the Church was...

The greatest truth is always simple. Men who must build elaborate systems to justify their beliefs are usually trying to justify something that would collapse on inspection if stated plainly. I distrust complexity in ethics as I distrust complexity in recipes — it usually conceals bad ingredients.

Happy families are all alike; every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way. The sole meaning of life is to serve humanity. If you want to be happy, be.

All happy families are alike; each unhappy family is unhappy in its own way. I began Anna Karenina with this sentence and found it contained the whole novel. Happiness is a convergence — to be well you must have health, love, adequate resources, and a tolerable conscience, and each of these must be present. Unhappiness can be achieved by the failure of any...

Everyone thinks of changing the world, but no one thinks of changing himself. The two most powerful warriors are patience and time. All great literature is one of two stories: a man goes on a journey, or a stranger comes to town.

The two most powerful warriors are patience and time. In war, in love, in writing — the man who can wait has already defeated half his enemies. The other half defeat themselves if you give them enough of both.

We do not love people so much for the good they have done us as for the good we have done them. This is why mothers love their children with a ferocity proportional to the cost of raising them, and why kindness breeds attachment in the giver more reliably than in the receiver.

I wrote War and Peace between 1863 and 1869. It is roughly 580,000 words. I revised it seven times. My wife Sonya copied it out by hand, in full, for each revision — seven times, approximately 580,000 words each time. She copied four million words of my drafts. I am grateful to her.

The book is about 1812 and Napoleon's invasion of Russia, but it is also...