Guess whose birthday it is today?? No, not mine. Although it’s another September baby’s! It’s Leo Tolstoy’s would-be birthday…if he were alive; it’s the 186th anniversary of his birth. In his honour, I’m sharing some of his best quotes. He gifted the world with a lot of wisdom and truth, moving from a very (deservedly) celebrated novelist to a moralist in his lifetime. I really like him.

“If I know the way home and am walking along it drunkenly, is it any less the right way because I am staggering from side to side! ”
― Leo Tolstoy

“Happiness does not depend on outward things, but on the way we see them.”
― Leo Tolstoy

“The best stories don’t come from “good vs. bad” but “good vs. good.”
― Leo Tolstoy

“All the girls in the world were divided into two classes: one class included all the girls in the world except her, and they had all the usual human feelings and were very ordinary girls; while the other class -herself alone- had no weaknesses and was superior to all humanity.”
― Leo Tolstoy, Anna Karenina

“Muhammad has always been standing higher than the Christianity. He does not consider god as a human being and never makes himself equal to God. Muslims worship nothing except God and Muhammad is his Messenger. There is no any mystery and secret in it.”
― Leo Tolstoy

“But I’m glad you’ll see me as I am. Above all, I wouldn’t want people to think that I want to prove anything. I don’t want to prove anything, I just want to live; to cause no evil to anyone but myself. I have that right, haven’t I?”
― Leo Tolstoy

“What counts in making a happy marriage is not so much how compatible you are but how you deal with incompatibility.”
― Leo Tolstoy

“A man is like a fraction whose numerator is what he is and whose denominator is what he thinks of himself. The larger the denominator, the smaller the fraction.”
― Leo Tolstoy

“He felt now that he was not simply close to her, but that he did not know where he ended and she began.”
― Leo Tolstoy

“Every lie is a poison; there are no harmless lies. Only the truth is safe. Only the truth gives me consolation – it is the one unbreakable diamond.”
― Leo Tolstoy

“He soon felt that the fulfillment of his desires gave him only one grain of the mountain of happiness he had expected. This fulfillment showed him the eternal error men make in imagining that their happiness depends on the realization of their desires.”
― Leo Tolstoy, Anna Karenina

“She had no need to ask why he had come. She knew as certainly as if he had told her that he was here to be where she was.”
― Leo Tolstoy, Anna Karenina, Vol 1 of 8

“Music is the shorthand of emotion”
― Leo Tolstoy

“We are asleep until we fall in Love!”
― Leo Tolstoy, War and Peace

“Which is worse? the wolf who cries before eating the lamb or the wolf who does not.”
― Leo Tolstoy

“Instead of going to Paris to attend lectures, go to the public library, and you won’t come out for twenty years, if you really wish to learn.”
― Leo Tolstoy

“To tell the truth is very difficult, and young people are rarely capable of it.”
― Leo Tolstoy

“Man cannot possess anything as long as he fears death. But to him who does not fear it, everything belongs. If there was no suffering, man would not know his limits, would not know himself. ”
― Leo Tolstoy, War and Peace

“I sit on a man’s back choking him and making him carry me, and yet assure myself and others that i am sorry for him and wish to lighten his load by all means possible….except by getting off his back.”
― Leo Tolstoy, What Then Must We Do?

“Because of the self-confidence with which he had spoken, no one could tell whether what he said was very clever or very stupid.”
― Leo Tolstoy

“Every heart has its own skeletons.”
― Leo Tolstoy

“It’s all God’s will: you can die in your sleep, and God can spare you in battle.”
― Leo Tolstoy, War and Peace

“My principal sin is doubt. I doubt everything, and am in doubt most of the time.”
― Leo Tolstoy, Anna Karenina Notes

“Historians are like deaf people who go on answering questions that no one has asked them.”
― Leo Tolstoy

“He went down trying not to look long at her, as though she were the sun, but he saw her, as one sees the sun, without looking.”
― Leo Tolstoy, Anna Karenina