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Death Quotes by Leo Tolstoy

87 Death quotes by Leo Tolstoy

All Death quotes Leo Tolstoy’s page

Leo Tolstoy paints death as an unstoppable force that confronts us suddenly. He describes personal loss, the pain of a brother’s death, and the idea that understanding death can make life feel unimportant. He also reflects on how faith can turn death from evil into something less frightening.

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“Loss and gain are brothers twain.”

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“Grief is never fatal.”

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But the peasants - how do the peasants die?

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Well, so it isn't time yet to die, is it?

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“He saw nothing but death or the advance towards death in everything.”

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How often we sin, how much we deceive, and all for what?... All will end in death, all!

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You will die and it will all be over. You will die and find out everything or cease asking.

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Everything ends in death, everything. Death is terrible.

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He who has a mistaken idea of life, will always have a mistaken idea of death.

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“Death is finished, he said to himself. It is no more!”

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The true office of any faith is to give life a meaning which death cannot destroy.

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Even in the valley of the shadow of death, two and two do not make six.

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And you know, there's less charm in life when you think about death--but it's more peaceful.

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Just when the question of how to live had become clearer to him, a new insoluble problem presented itself - Death.

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“Death, the inevitable end of everything, confronted him for the first time with irresistible force.”

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All violence consists in some people forcing others, under threat of suffering or death, to do what they do not want to…

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Here I am alive, and it's not my fault, so I have to try and get by as best I can without…

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“It can't be that life is so senseless and horrible. But if it really has been so horrible and senseless, why must…

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I believe in one, incomprehensible God, the immortality of the soul and eternal retribution for our acts.

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“What is bad? What is Good? What should one love, what hate? Why live and what am I? What is life, what…

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If he be really and seriously seeking to live a good life, the first thing from which he will abstain will always…

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“Throughout the whole time that Grandmama's body was in the house I was oppressed with the fear of death, for the corpse…

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Man cannot possess anything as long as he fears death. But to him who does not fear it, everything belongs. If there…

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When you understand that you will die to-morrow, if not to-day, and nothing will be left, then everything is so unimportant!... So…

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Death destroys the body, as the scaffolding is destroyed after the building is up and finished. And he whose building is up…

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“I realized that even if all the people in the world from the day of creation found this to be necessary according…

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“A little muzhik was working on the railroad, mumbling in his beard. And the candle by which she had read the book…

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“But when, as is most often the case, the husband and wife accept the external obligation to live together all their lives…

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“Being lost and dead he had only to lie still, and was no longer obliged to wander through the pathless taiga. Otherwise,…

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Loving with human love, one may pass from love to hatred; but divine love cannot change. Nothing, not even death, can shatter…

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“... and for the first time in his life the possibility of death presented itself, not in relation to the living world,…

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What is bad? What is good? What should one love, what hate? Why live, and what am I? What is lie,what is…

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“Since the moment when, at the sigh of his beloved and dying brother, Levin for the first time looked at the questions…

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“The enemy stopped shooting, and that strict, menacing, inaccessible, and elusive line that separates two enemy armies became all the more clearly…

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“What is bad? What is good? What should one love and what hate? What does one live for? And what am I?…

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“Well, what of it? I've not given up thinking of death. It's true that it's high time I was dead; and that…

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The possibility of killing one's self is a safety valve. Having it, man has no right to say life is unbearable.

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“I work, I want to do something, but I had forgotten it must all end; I had forgotten--death.”

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Here I am...wanting to accomplish something and completely forgetting it must all end--that there is such a thing as death.

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He sought his former accustomed fear of death and did not find it. "Where is it? What death?" There was no fear…

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More by Leo Tolstoy

These joys were so trifling as to be as imperceptible as grains of gold among the sand, and in moments of depression she saw…

The only significance of life consists in helping to establish the kingdom of God.

“I already love in you your beauty, but I am only beginning to love in you that which is eternal and ever precious –…

Energy rests upon love; and come as it will, there's no forcing it.

“If you only knew what those society women are, and women in general! My father is right. Selfish, vain, stupid, trivial in everything—that's what…

To evoke in oneself a feeling one has once experienced, and having evoked it in oneself, then by means of movements, lines, colors, sounds,…

To speak of it would be giving importance to that which has none.

Once we're thrown off our habitual paths, we think all is lost, but it's only here that the new and the good begins.

“He knew she was there by the rapture and the terror that seized on his heart. She was standing talking to a lady at…

Rest, nature, books, music...such is my idea of happiness.

“He was not to blame for being born with an irrepressible charachter and a mind some how constrained.”

I ask one thing only: I ask for the right to hope, to suffer as I do. But if even that cannot be, command…

The idea shared by many that life is a vale of tears is just as false as the idea shared by the great majority,…

To say that a work of art is good, but incomprehensible to the majority of men, is the same as saying of some kind…

True life is lived when tiny changes occur.