24 Leo Tolstoy Quotes on Truth

Leo Tolstoy quotes on truth

1. The hero of my tale, whom I love with all the power of my soul, whom I have tried to portray in all his beauty, who has been, is, and will be beautiful, is Truth.

2. Error is the force that welds men together; truth is communicated to men only by deeds of truth.

13. The only significance of life consists in helping to establish the kingdom of God; and this can be done only by means of the acknowledgment and profession of the truth by each one of us.

    Attribution disputed; shown as originally published.

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

31. For us, with the rule of right and wrong given us by Christ, there is nothing for which we have no standard. And there is no greatness where there is not simplicity, goodness, and truth.

37. There is one evident, indubitable manifestation of the Divinity, and that is the laws of right which are made known to the world through Revelation.

38. One can insult an honest man or an honest woman, but to tell a thief that he is a thief is merely la constation d'un fait [The establishing of a fact.]

39. Go - take the mother's soul, and learn three truths: Learn What dwells in man, What is not given to man, and What men live by. When thou hast learnt these things, thou shalt return to heaven.

45. Quite often a man goes on for years imagining that the religious teaching that had been imparted to him since childhood is still intact, while all the time there is not a trace of it left in him.

53. The sole meaning of life is to serve humanity by contributing to the establishment of the kingdom of God, which can only be done by the recognition and profession of the truth by every man.

76. Truth is... one approach to the attainment of the good, but in and of itself, it is neither the good nor the beautiful... Socrates, Pascal, and others regarded knowledge of the truth with regard to purposeless objects as incongruous with the good... [by] exposing deception, truth destroys illusion, which is the principle attribute of beauty.

78. I know that most men - not only those considered clever, but even those who are very clever and capable of understanding most difficult scientific, mathematical, or philosophic, problems - can seldom discern even the simplest and most obvious truth if it be such as obliges them to admit the falsity of conclusions they have formed, perhaps with much difficulty - conclusions of which they are proud, which they have taught to others, and on which they have built their lives.

81. ...the reason lies in the lack of a reasonable religious teaching which, by explaining the meaning of life would supply a supreme law for the guidance of conduct, and would replace the more than dubious precepts of pseudo-religion and pseudo-science and the immoral conclusions deduced from them, commonly called 'civilization.'

83. The recognition that love represents the highest morality was nowhere denied or contradicted, but this truth was so interwoven everywhere with all kinds of falsehoods which distorted it, that finally nothing of it remained but words.

89. Such are the scientific justifications of the principle of coercion. They are not merely weak but absolutely invalid, yet they are so much needed by those who occupy privileged positions that they believe in them as blindly... And the unfortunate majority of men bound to toil is so dazzled by the pomp with which these 'scientific truths' are presented, that ...it accepts these scientific stupidities for holy truth, ...and it continues to submit to the present holders of power who are just as hard-hearted but rather more numerous than before.

98. ...men can only recognize this truth to its full extent when they have completely freed themselves from all religious and scientific superstitions and from all the consequent misrepresentations and sophistical distortions by which its recognition has been hindered for centuries.

99. In order that men should embrace the truth - not in the vague way they did in childhood, nor in the one-sided and perverted way presented to them by their religious and scientific teachers, but embrace it as their highest law- the complete liberation of this truth from all and every superstition ...not such as was effected in the religious sphere by Guru Nanak, the founder of the sect of the Sikhs, and in the Christian world by Luther, and by similar reformers in other religions - but a fundamental cleansing of religious consciousness from all ancient religious and modern scientific superstitions.

103. ...the indubitable, eternal truth inherent in man, which is one and the same in all the great religions of the world. It will in due time emerge and make its way to general recognition, and the nonsense that has obscured it will disappear of itself, and with it will go the evil from which humanity now suffers.

108. History would be a wonderful thing - if it were only true.

113. If we would only testify to the truth as we see it, it would turn out that there are hundreds, thousands, even millions of other people just as we are, who see the truth as we do... and are only waiting, again as we are, for someone to proclaim it. The Kingdom of God is within you.

128. The only absolute knowledge attainable by man is that life is meaningless.

134. Truth, like gold, is to be obtained not by its growth, but by washing away from it all that is not gold.

135. Which is worse? the wolf who cries before eating the lamb or the wolf who does not.

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