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Tolstoy Quotes

Browse 51 quotes about Tolstoy.

Tolstoy Quotes

“if they hadn’t both been pretending, but had had what is called a heart-to-heart talk, that is, simply told each other just what they were thinking and feeling, then they would just have looked into each other’s eyes, and Constantine would only have said: ‘You’re dying, dying, dying!’ – while Nicholas would simply have replied: ‘I know I’m dying, but I’m afraid, afraid, afraid!’ That’s all they would have said if they’d been talking straight from the heart. But it was impossible to live that way, so Levin tried to do what he’d been trying to do all his life without being able to, what a great many people could do so well, as he observed, and without which life was impossible: he tried to say something different from what he thought, and he always felt it came out false, that his brother caught him out and was irritated by it.”

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Author:Leo Tolstoy
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“Segundo Schelling, a arte é produto ou consequência da concepção de mundo segundo a qual o sujeito se torna o seu objecto e o próprio objecto se torna o seu próprio sujeito. A beleza é a imagem do infinito no finito. E o principal carácter da obra de arte é o infinito inconsciente. A arte é a união do subjectivo com o objectivo, da natureza com a razão, do inconsciente com o consciente. E por isso a arte é a mais elevada forma de conhecimento. A beleza é a contemplação das coisas em si mesmas, como elas são na base de todas as coisas (in den urbilden). O belo é produzido não pelo artista através do seu conhecimento ou vontade, mas pela própria ideia de beleza nele.”

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Book:What Is Art?
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“There is history the way Tolstoy imagined it, as a great, slow-moving weather system in which even tsars and generals are just leaves before the storm. And there is history the way Hollywood imagines it, as a single story line in which the right move by the tsar or the wrong move by the general changes everything. Most of us, deep down, are probably Hollywood people. We like to invent “what if” scenarios--what if x had never happened, what if y had happened instead?--because we like to believe that individual decisions make a difference: that, if not for x, or if only there had been y, history might have plunged forever down a completely different path. Since we are agents, we have an interest in the efficacy of agency.”

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Author:Louis Menand
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“The same Sermon on the Mount that influenced Tolstoy to write “The Kingdom of God is Within You”, inspired me to a great extent in my work “Principia Humanitas”.”

InspirationalPhilosophyGodMotivationalTruthLiteratureChristInspiringWords Of WisdomJesus ChristHumanismHumanistThinkerWise SayingsSermonsKingdom Of GodPhilosophy Of ReligionLove Thy NeighborJesus QuotesSermon On The MountTolstoyPrinciples Of HumanismHumanistsPrincipia HumanitasSermon On Mont
Book:We Are All Black: A Treatise on Racism
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“Tolstoy’s accounts of Borodino and Austerlitz show us what real war is like: no one knows what the orders are or who is winning. No one has any idea what to do. Soldiers are permitted to kill each other and are maddened, sooner or later, by the realization that someone else, somewhere relatively comfortable, thinks this is the right thing for them to do. And we are not so far from that kind of chaos in everyday life, really. I walk down the street towards the Infirmary, every Wednesday, and I go in and wait and sit down and everyone is quite polite, and I am played with by the law and turned into a sexless person. The most extraordinary thing is done behind a nice white screen. And the nurse who injects me does it with a good will, because she has been told that it is her job. She doubtless thinks of herself as a freely choosing agent. She likes to think she does her job well, but at the same time she is just doing her job. (One hears this a lot.) That means she does not take ultimate responsibility for her actions, because those kinds of decisions are taken, or absorbed, by more powerful persons, like Tolstoy’s generals, who know what they are doing. She sees no contradiction between this and her own intuitive sense of agency.”

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Book:Murmur
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“The endless ocean was his sole companion , and on some deeply sentimental level, it seemed sufficient. Almost apt. He aligned himself with Thoreau and Tolstoy, he felt like their peers. The kinship with nature devoted humans to a mythical state, a heightened persona beyond the reach of mere mortals. At least that was what he told himself on the lonely nights when insomnia played on his fears and the howling wind pierced through his soul.”

NatureSeaLonelinessWindSolitudeOceanIsolationMortalityInsomniaBeing AloneSentimentalityMan And NatureTolstoyLonely NightsThoreauShunning Society
Book:Consequence
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“Tolstoy's novels are about the planet Earth and Solzhenitsyn's are about Pluto. Tolstoy is writing about a society and Solzhenitsyn is writing about the lack of one... surely there is something wilfully unhistorical about being disappointed that Pierre Bezhukov or Andrey Bolkonsky or Natasha Rostov find no equivalents in Cancer Ward. Characterization in such wealthy detail has become, in Solzhenitsyn's Russia, a thing of the past, and to expect it is like expecting the fur-lined brocades and gold-threaded silks of the Florentine Renaissance to crop up in Goya's visions of the horrors of war. Solzhenitsyn's contemporary novels- I mean the novels set in the Soviet Union- are not really concerned with society. They are concerned with what happens after society has been destroyed.”

SocietyRussiaSoviet UnionTolstoySolzhenitsynCancer Ward
Book:Cultural Cohesion: The Essential Essays
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“One peculiar feature of Tolstoy's style is what I shall term the "groping purist." In describing a meditation, emotion, or tangible object, Tolstoy follows the contours of the thought, the emotion, or the object until he is perfectly satisfied with his re-creation, his rendering. This involves what we might call creative repetitions, a compact series of repetitive statements, coming one immediately after the other, each more expressive, each closer to Tolstoy's meaning. He gropes, he unwraps the verbal parcel for its inner sense, he peels the apple of the phrase, he tries to say it one way, then a better way, he gropes, he stalls, he toys, he Tolstoys with words.”

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Book:Lectures on Russian Literature
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“Before and after the funeral I never ceased to cry and be miserable, but it makes me ashamed when I think back on that sadness of mine, seeing that always in it was an element of self-love - now a desire to show that I prayed more than any one else, now concern about the impression I was producing on others, now an aimless curiosity which caused me to observe Mimi's cap or the faces of those around me. I despised myself for not experiencing sorrow to the exclusion of everything else, and I tried to conceal all other feelings: this made my grief insincere and unnatural. Moreover, I felt a kind of enjoyment in knowing that I was unhappy and I tried to stimulate my sense of unhappiness, and this interest in myself did more than anything else to stifle real sorrow in me.”

DeathGriefChildhoodYouthSelf LoveSorrowUnhappinessFuneralBoyhoodTolstoy
Book:Childhood, Boyhood, Youth
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“Yes, it was real hatred - not the hatred we only read about in novels, which I do not believe in, hatred that is supposed to find satisfaction in doing some one harm - but the hatred that fills you with overpowering aversion for a person who, however, deserves your respect, yet whose hair, his neck, the way he walks, the sound of his voice, his whole person, his every gesture are repulsive to you, and at the same time some unaccountable force draws you to him and compels you to follow his slightest acts with uneasy attention.”

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Book:Childhood, Boyhood, Youth
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“There are moments when the future looks so black that one is afraid to let one's thoughts dwell on it, refuses to let one's mind function and tries to convince oneself that the future will not be, and the past has not been. At such moments, when the will is not governed or modified by reflection and the only incentives that remain in life are our physical instincts, I can understand how a child, being particularly prone owing to lack of experience to fall into such a state, may without the least hesitation or fear, with a smile of curiosity deliberately set fire to his own house - and then fan the flames where is brothers, his father an his mother, all of who he loves dearly, are sleeping.”

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Book:Childhood, Boyhood, Youth
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“For the first time I envisaged the idea that we - that is, our family - were not the only people in the world, that not every conceivable interest was centered in ourselves but that there existed another life - that of people who had nothing in common with us, cared nothing for us, had no idea of our existence even. I must have known all this before but I had not known it as I did now - I had not realized it; I had not felt it.”

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Book:Childhood, Boyhood, Youth
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“In art, [Tolstoy] articulates with almost prophetic brilliance the elements that combine to make and keep women inferior, all of them originating, in his view, in sexual intercourse, because sexual intercourse requires objectification and therefore is exploitation. In life, he blamed and hated Sophie [his wife], feeling antagonism and repulsion, because he wanted to fuck her and did fuck her.”

SexPatriarchyDominanceTolstoyMale Sexuality
Book:Intercourse
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“Every novel says to the reader: “Things are not as simple as you think.” That is the novel’s eternal truth, but it grows steadily harder to hear amid the din of easy, quick answers that come faster than the question and block it off. In the spirit of our time, it’s either Anna or Karenin who is right, and the ancient wisdom of Cervantes, telling us about the difficulty of knowing and the elusiveness of truth, seems cumbersome and useless.”

ExistentialismModernismEpistemologyTolstoyCervantes
Book:The Art of the Novel
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“The worst feature of the Common Core is its anti-humanistic, utilitarian approach to education. It mistakes what a child is and what a human being is for. That is why it has no use for poetry, and why it boils the study of literature down to the scrambling up of some marketable "skill" [...] you don't read good books to learn about what literary artists do...you learn about literary art so that you can read more good books and learn more from them. It is as if Thomas Gradgrind had gotten hold of the humanities and turned them into factory robotics.”

LiteratureEducationBooksStandardsShakespeareNovelsSchool SystemJoyceDanteTolstoyDostoevskyCommon CoreSchool ReformTolstoi
Author:Anthony Esolen
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“In my considered opinion, salary is payment for goods delivered and it must conform to the law of supply and demand. If, therefore, the fixed salary is a violation of this law - as, for instance, when I see two engineers leaving college together and both equally well trained and efficient, and one getting forty thousand while the other only earns two thousand , or when lawyers and hussars, possessing no special qualifications, are appointed directors of banks with huge salaries - I can only conclude that their salaries are not fixed according to the law of supply and demand but simply by personal influence. And this is an abuse important in itself and having a deleterious effect on government service.”

GovernmentEconomicsSupply And DemandTolstoyAnna KareninaSalaries
Book:ANNA KARENINA
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“Jeg hadde aldri et inntrykk av - og jg tror at jeg ikke tar feil - at Lev Nikolaevitsj ikke var særlig glad i å tale om litteratur; men han var alltid levende interessert i forfatterens person.”

ReadingTolstoyPsykologiTolstoiLitteraturTolstojIntellecutals
Book:Reminiscences (of Leo Tolstoy; Anton Chekhov; Leonid Andreyev; Alexander Blok; & Letter to Constantin Stanislavsky)
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“Tolstoy was not associated with any revolutionary group but his writings had a tremendous influence. A continuous stream of Utopians, rebels and cranks passed in and out of his doors. When I was a guest at Yasnaya Polyana, his country estate, I was shocked by the depth of his despondency, and after he had forecast, with a foresight given only to genius, the bloody upheavals to come, I left his presence deeply regretting that age, moral distress and spiritual loneliness rendered him incapable of looking joyfully forward to what many believed would be the birth of a great and enduring democratic Russian Republic.”

LiteratureDemocracyRevolutionUtopianMisfitsDisillusionRussian RevolutionRebelsTolstoyLeo Tolstoy
Book:Revolution Why, How, When?
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“The same thing happens in the search for the laws of historical movement. The movement of mankind, proceeding from a countless number of human wills, occurs continuously. To comprehend the laws of this movement is the goal of history. But in order to comprehend the laws of the continuous movement of the sum of all individual wills, human reason allows for arbitrary, discrete units. The first method of history consists in taking an arbitrary series of continuous events and examining it separately from others, whereas there is not and cannot be a beginning to any event, but one event always continuously follows another. The second method consists in examining the actions of one person, a king, a commander, as the sum of individual wills, whereas the sum of individual wills is never expressed in the activity of one historical person. Historical science in its movement always takes ever smaller units for examination, and in this way strives to approach the truth. But however small the units that history takes, we feel that allowing for a unit that is separate from another, allowing for the beginning of some phenomenon, and allowing for the notion that all individual wills are expressed in the actions of one historical person, is false in itself. Any conclusion of historical science, without the least effort on the part of criticism, falls apart like dust, leaving nothing behind, only as a result of the fact that criticism selects as an object for observation a larger or smaller discrete unit, which it always has the right to do, because any chosen historical unit is always arbitrary. Only by admitting an infinitesimal unit for observation—a differential of history, that is, the uniform strivings of people—and attaining to the art of intigrating them (taking the sums of these infinitesimal quantities) can we hope to comprehend the laws of history.”

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Book:War and Peace
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“Their destiny – hers, his, that of every descendant from the Cave – would be the same as the thistle the image of which obsessed Tolstoy, the same stubborn thistle he sought out in the Caucasian mountains. He was travelling in a scrap metal car along the muddy track to Shatoi and caught a glimpse, beneath them, of tanks and vehicles incinerated in an ambush similar to the one set for the Tsar’s soldiers a century and a half earlier. He witnessed once more history’s stupid repetitions, its obtuse cruelty.”

WarHistoryRepetitionTanksSoldiersAmbushTolstoyTsarObtuse Cruelty
Book:Blind Rider
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“One day at Fenner's (the university cricket ground at Cambridge), just before the last war, G. H. Hardy and I were talking about Einstein. Hardy had met him several times, and I had recently returned from visiting him. Hardy was saying that in his lifetime there had only been two men in the world, in all the fields of human achievement, science, literature, politics, anything you like, who qualified for the Bradman class. For those not familiar with cricket, or with Hardy's personal idiom, I ought to mention that “the Bradman class” denoted the highest kind of excellence: it would include Shakespeare, Tolstoy, Newton, Archimedes, and maybe a dozen others. Well, said Hardy, there had only been two additions in his lifetime. One was Lenin and the other Einstein.”

ScienceLiteraturePoliticsNewtonShakespeareCambridgeWilliam ShakespeareEinsteinTolstoyLeninAlbert EinsteinIsaac NewtonLeo TolstoyArchimedesVladimir LeninG H HardyBradman ClassCount Lev Nikolayevich TolstoyGodfrey HardyGodfrey Harold HardyLev Nikolayevich TolstoyVladimir Ilyich Lenin
Book:Variety of Men
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