3 quotations linked to My Religion by or associated with Leo Tolstoy, with source notes, explanations and related topics.
Religious transformation, truth in action, service, meaning, conscience, responsibility and Tolstoy’s interpretation of Jesus’s teaching.
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“Five years ago faith came to me”
Tolstoy marks the beginning of a religious reorientation that he says changed his desires and reversed his judgments about how to live.
Source note: My Religion, Introduction; Huntington Smith translation, represented 1885 Crowell edition, Project Gutenberg #43794. Tolstoy’s autobiographical opening says that faith came to him five years earlier and describes the reversal of his former judgments and desires.
“truth is truth only when it is in action”
Tolstoy argues that truth becomes socially consequential when embodied in conduct rather than remaining only an inward opinion or abstract proposition.
Source note: My Religion, Chapter XII; Huntington Smith translation, represented 1885 Crowell edition, Project Gutenberg #43794. In the concluding chapter Tolstoy argues that truth becomes transmissible when embodied in action and brought to individual conscience; the explicitly Christian and social context remains visible.
“The true life is the life which adds something”
In Tolstoy’s Christian interpretation, meaningful life contributes to a human inheritance received from earlier generations and passed forward to others.
Source note: My Religion, Chapter VIII; Huntington Smith translation, represented 1885 Crowell edition, Project Gutenberg #43794. In Tolstoy’s contrast between isolated personal life and the “true life,” the passage treats inherited human labour and obligation across generations within his Christian argument, not as a secular universal claim.