Who really said it

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

Tolstoy’s idea — not his exact words Leo Tolstoy 1828–1910 · Russian novelist & moral philosopher

Disputed Free to reuse

The sentiment is genuinely Tolstoy’s, from “Three Methods of Reform” in Pamphlets: Translated from the Russian ↗ (1900, translated by Aylmer Maude) — but his actual wording is “everybody thinks of changing humanity, and nobody thinks of changing himself,” not the tidier “Everyone thinks of changing the world…” version that circulates online. Wikiquote ↗ traces that shorter phrasing to a 1999 book, not to Tolstoy.

Last verified 8 Jul 2026 · how we verify · spot an error?

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“Everyone thinks of changing the world, but no one thinks of changing himself” Leo Tolstoy — but this exact wording is a later paraphrase, not his own

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Provenance

The source

Work: “Three Methods of Reform”
Collection: Pamphlets: Translated from the Russian
Translation: Aylmer Maude, for the Free Age Press, 1900
First published: 1900, Christchurch, England

There can be only one permanent revolution — a moral one; the regeneration of the inner man. How is this revolution to take place? Nobody knows how it will take place in humanity, but every man feels it clearly in himself. And yet in our world everybody thinks of changing humanity, and nobody thinks of changing himself. 1900

This is Tolstoy’s own wording, in the 1900 Aylmer Maude translation — not the shorter “Everyone thinks of changing the world…” phrasing that circulates today.

Scanned 1900 edition

View the original Free Age Press edition

Three Methods of Reform, on Wikisource

How we verified this

Tolstoy wrote this passage in “Three Methods of Reform,” part of Some Social Remedies in his 1900 pamphlet collection, translated by Aylmer Maude for the pacifist Free Age Press ↗.
The Maude translation reads “everybody thinks of changing humanity, and nobody thinks of changing himself” — close in meaning to the popular quote, but not identical in wording, as confirmed in the full chapter text ↗.
Wikiquote ↗ lists “Everyone thinks of changing the world, but no one thinks of changing himself” as a variant, citing its earliest known appearance as The Artist’s Way at Work (1999) by Mark A. Bryan, Julia Cameron, and Catherine Allen — not any Tolstoy edition.
A scan of the original 1900 Free Age Press edition ↗ is on the Internet Archive.

Public domain

The excerpt above is Aylmer Maude’s 1900 English translation, published well before 1931, so it is in the public domain. The shorter, more famous paraphrase in wide circulation online is a different matter — it doesn’t appear in this translation, and its own origin (traced by Wikiquote to a 1999 book) hasn’t been independently confirmed here.

Fact-check

Often misattributed

The tidy, quotable “Everyone thinks of changing the world, but no one thinks of changing himself” is everywhere online as a direct Tolstoy quotation — but it doesn’t match what he actually wrote.

Quote sites (Goodreads, BrainyQuote, AZQuotes, and others)

Present the short, punchy phrasing as a verbatim Tolstoy quotation with no citation to a specific work, when his actual 1900 translated sentence reads differently.

The Artist’s Way at Work (1999) Likely paraphrase source

Wikiquote traces the familiar short wording to this book by Mark A. Bryan, Julia Cameron, and Catherine Allen, not to any translation of Tolstoy’s own writing, as shown on Wikiquote ↗.

What Tolstoy actually wrote, in Aylmer Maude’s 1900 translation of “Three Methods of Reform,” is: “And yet in our world everybody thinks of changing humanity, and nobody thinks of changing himself” — see the full text on Wikisource ↗.

Context

Where the real line comes from

“Three Methods of Reform” is a short essay from Some Social Remedies, part of the pamphlet collection Tolstoy’s follower Vladimir Chertkov distributed through the Free Age Press in 1900. In it, Tolstoy weighs three ways reformers had proposed to relieve the condition of laborers, and argues that only a moral change beginning within each person can produce what he calls a “permanent revolution.”

That argument was one of the seeds of the Christian pacifism Tolstoy preached in his later decades, which went on to shape Gandhi’s thinking on nonviolent resistance. The line about everyone wanting to change humanity while no one changes himself was his summary of why, in his view, reform movements aimed outward kept failing.

Everybody thinks of changing humanity, and nobody thinks of changing himself.

Explore

Filed under

More provenance-checked quotes on the same theme, each with its reuse status.

Change Growth Humility

Go further

Dig deeper

Trusted places to keep pulling the thread — primary archives, fact-checks, and scholarship. We show how we used each one before you leave.

Three Methods of Reformen.wikisource.org

Full English text of the 1900 Aylmer Maude translation

Some Social Remedies, ch. 3marxists.org

Alternate hosting of the same translated chapter

Pamphlets: Translated from the Russian (1900)archive.org

Scanned original Free Age Press edition

Leo Tolstoyen.wikiquote.org

Lists the quote and its 1999-sourced variant, with citations for each

Aylmer and Louise Maudeen.wikipedia.org

Background on Tolstoy's principal English translators

The author

About Leo Tolstoy

Leo Tolstoy

1828–1910 · Russian novelist & Christian moral philosopher

Leo Tolstoy is best known for the novels War and Peace and Anna Karenina, but in his later decades he became a fierce moral and social critic, developing the Christian-anarchist philosophy of nonviolent resistance that later influenced Gandhi. Much of his later writing, distributed through the pacifist Free Age Press, argued that lasting social change had to begin with individual moral transformation.

For writers & researchers

Cite this

The primary source (Chicago)

Tolstoy, Leo. “Three Methods of Reform.” In Pamphlets: Translated from the Russian, translated by Aylmer Maude. Christchurch, England: Free Age Press, 1900.

This verification page

Quotle.info. “Who really said ‘Everyone thinks of changing the world, but no one thinks of changing himself’?” Last verified 8 Jul 2026. https://quotle.info/who-said/everyone-thinks-of-changing-the-world-but-no-one-thinks-of