Leo Tolstoy

1828–1910 · Russian novelist & moral philosopher

Tolstoy, author of War and Peace and Anna Karenina, spent his later years as a radical Christian moralist and pacifist. His 1904 essay ‘Bethink Yourselves!’, written against the Russo-Japanese War, closes with a garland of borrowed maxims — one block of which Tolstoy attributes to Marcus Aurelius. It is inside that loosely rendered block that “the object of life… escape finding oneself in the ranks of the insane” first appears in English — a paraphrase that later circulated worldwide as a genuine Marcus Aurelius quotation.

Traced to source

3 quotes we’ve traced to Leo Tolstoy

“Everyone thinks of changing the world, but no one thinks of changing himself”

Disputed

“The object in life is not to be on the side of the majority, but to escape finding oneself in the ranks of the insane”

Disputed

“To understand everything is to forgive everything”

Disputed

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