Lew Tolstoy Quotes

We are accustomed to understand art to be only what we hear and see in theaters, concerts, and exhibitions, together with buildings, statues, poems, novels. . . . But all this is but the smallest part of the art by which we communicate with each other in life. All human life is filled with works of art of every kind - from cradlesong, jest, mimicry, the ornamentation of houses, dress, and utensils, up to church services, buildings, monuments, and triumphal processions. It is all artistic activity. So that by art, in the limited sense of the word, we do not mean all human activity transmitting feelings, but only that part which we for some reason select from it and to which we attach special importance. ~ Leo Tolstoy

It was impossible not to hate such pathetically ugly people... It was so clear to Anna that no one had anything to be glad about, that this laughter irritated her painfully, and she would have liked to stop her ears so as not to hear it. ~ Leo Tolstoy

The faces of these young people, especially those who were military men, bore that expression of condescending respect for their elders which seems to say to the older generation, "We are prepared to respect and honor you, but all the same remember that the future belongs to us. ~ Leo Tolstoy

I'm the most translated writer in the world, behind Lenin, Tolstoy, Gorki and Jules Verne. And they're all dead ... ~ Mickey Spillane

It never occurred to my mind that possibly poor Ilinka was suffering far less from bodily pain than from the thought that five companions for whom he may have felt a genuine liking had, for no reason at all, combined to hurt and humiliate him. ~ Leo Tolstoy

I want to enrich medical science with a new term: Arbeitskur. ~ Leo Tolstoy

The artist of the future will live the ordinary life of a human being, earning his living by some kind of labour. He will strive to give the fruit of that supreme spiritual force which passes through him to the greatest number of people, because this conveying of the feelings that have been born in him to the greatest number of people is his joy and his reward. The artist of the future will not even understand how it is possible for an artist, whose joy consists in the widest dissemination of his works, to give these works only in exchange for a certain payment. ~ Leo Tolstoy

It all depends with how much judgment and knowledge the thing's done. ~ Leo Tolstoy

Now he experienced a feeling akin to that of a man whom while calmly crossing a bridge over a precipice, should suddenly discover that the bridge is broken, and that there is a chasm below. That chasm was life itself, the bridge that artificial life in which Aleksey Aleksandrovich had lived. ~ Leo Tolstoy

Everything was made bright by her. She was the smile that shed light all around her. ~ Leo Tolstoy

Reason is often the slave of sin; it strives to justify it. ~ Leo Tolstoy

History would be a wonderful thing – if it were only true. ~ Leo Tolstoy

It's like Tolstoy said. Happiness is an allegory, unhappiness a story. ~ Haruki Murakami

All's over, and there's nothing more," said Dolly. "And the worst of it all is, you see, that I can't cast him off: there are the children, I am tied. And I can't live with him! It's torture to see him. ~ Leo Tolstoy

Music is the shorthand of emotion ~ Leo Tolstoy

Energy is based on love. ~ Leo Tolstoy

Vronsky meanwhile, in spite of the complete fulfilment of what he had so long desired, was not completely happy. He soon felt that the realization of his longing gave him only one grain of the mountain of bliss he had anticipated. That realization showed him the eternal error men make by imagining that happiness consists in the gratification of their wishes. When first he united his life with hers and donned civilian clothes, he felt the delight of freedom in general, such as he had not before known, and also the freedom of love - he was contented then, but not for long. Soon he felt rising in his soul a desire for desires - boredom. Involuntarily he began to snatch at every passing caprice, mistaking it for a desire and a purpose. ~ Leo Tolstoy

She went slowly along Theobald's Road, still holding off the moment of her return, wondering again whether it was not love she had lost so much as a modern form of respectability, where it was not contempt and ostracism she feared, as in the novels of Flaubert and Tolstoy, but pity. To be the object of general pity was also a form of social death. The nineteenth century was closer that most women thought. ~ Ian McEwan

When, as the researchers put it, "life's fragility is primed," people's goals and motives in their everyday lives shift completely. It's perspective, not age, that matters most. Tolstoy ~ Atul Gawande

What is now happening to the people of the East as of the West is like what happens to every individual when he passes from childhood to adolescence and from youth to manhood. He loses what had hitherto guided his life and lives without direction, not having found a new standard suitable to his age, and so he invents all sorts of occupations, cares, distractions, and stupefactions to divert his attention from the misery and senselessness of his life. Such a condition may last a long time. ~ Leo Tolstoy

The smallest bird cannot light upon the greatest tree without sending a shock to its most distant fiber. ~ Lew Wallace

What is the cause of historical events? Power. What is power? Power is the sum total of wills transferred to one person. On what condition are the willso fo the masses transferred to one person? On condition that the person express the will of the whole people. That is, power is power. That is, power is a word the meaning of which we do not understand. ~ Leo Tolstoy

Love. The reason I dislike that word is that it means too much for me, far more than you can understand."

- Anna Karenina {Anna Karenina} ~ Leo Tolstoy

Since the moment when, at the sight of his beloved and dying brother, Levin for the first time looked at the questions of life and death in the light of the new convictions, as he called them, which between the ages of twenty and thirty-four had imperceptibly replaced the beliefs of his childhood and youth, he had been less horrified by death than by life without the least knowledge of whence it came, what it is for, why, and what it is, Organisms, their destruction, the indestructibility of matter, the law of the conservation of energy, development - the terms that had superseded these beliefs - were very useful for mental purposes; but they gave no guidance for life, and Levin suddenly felt like a person who has exchanged a thick fur coat for a muslin garment and who, being out in the frost for the first time, becomes clearly convinced, not by arguments, but with the whole of his being, that he is as good as naked and that he must inevitably perish miserably. ~ Leo Tolstoy

He was very well aware that in their eyes the position of an unsuccessful lover of a girl, or of any woman free to marry, might be ridiculous. But the position of a man pursuing a married woman, and, regardless of everything, staking his life on drawing her into adultery, has something fine and grand about it, and can never be ridiculous; and so it was with a proud and gay smile under his mustaches that he lowered the opera glass and looked at his cousin. But ~ Leo Tolstoy

You will die and it will all be over. You will die and find out everything or cease asking. ~ Leo Tolstoy

Since corrupt people unite amongst themselves to constitute a force, then honest people must do the same. ~ Leo Tolstoy

It was very, very early in the morning. You were probably only just awake. Your mother was asleep in the corner. It was an exquisite morning. I was walking along wondering who it could be in a four-in-hand? It was a splendid set of four horses with bells, and in a second you flashed by, and I saw you at the window - you were sitting like this, holding the strings of your cap in both hands, and thinking awfully deeply about something," he said, smiling. "How I should like to know what you were thinking about then! Something important? ~ Leo Tolstoy

I believe that the reason of life is for each of us simply to grow in love. ~ Leo Tolstoy

This soldiering thing sadly deadens that very good thing, humanity. ~ Lew Wallace

In my spare time I didn't go out, I sat and read novels I got from the library: Grazia Deledda, Pirandello, Chekhov, Gogol, Tolstoy, Dostoyevsky. ~ Elena Ferrante