Levin Quotes

“He was afraid of defiling the love which filled his soul.”
― Leo Tolstoy, Anna Karenina

“He could not be mistaken. There were no other eyes like those in the world. There was only one creature in the world who could concentrate for him all the brightness and meaning of life. It was she. It was Kitty.”
― Leo Tolstoy, Anna Karenina

“My principal sin is doubt. I doubt everything, and am in doubt most of the time.”
― Leo Tolstoy, Anna Karenina

“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.”
― Leo Tolstoy

“How strange it was to think that he, who such a short time ago dared not believe in the happiness of her loving him, now felt unhappy because she loved him too much!”
― Leo Tolstoy, Anna Karenina

“He thought of nothing, wished for nothing, but not to be left behind the peasants, and to do his work as well as possible. He heard nothing but the swish of scythes, and saw before him Tit's upright figure mowing away, the crescent-shaped curve of the cut grass, the grass and flower heads slowly and rhythmically falling before the blade of his scythe, and ahead of him the end of the row, where would come the rest.

Suddenly, in the midst of his toil, without understanding what it was or whence it came, he felt a pleasant sensation of chill on his hot, moist shoulders. He glanced at the sky in the interval for whetting the scythes. A heavy, lowering storm cloud had blown up, and big raindrops were falling. Some of the peasants went to their coats and put them on; others--just like Levin himself--merely shrugged their shoulders, enjoying the pleasant coolness of it.

Another row, and yet another row, followed--long rows and short rows, with good grass and with poor grass. Levin lost all sense of time, and could not have told whether it was late or early now. A change began to come over his work, which gave him immense satisfaction. In the midst of his toil there were moments during which he forgot what he was doing, and it came all easy to him, and at those same moments his row was almost as smooth and well cut as Tit's. But so soon as he recollected what he was doing, and began trying to do better, he was at once conscious of all the difficulty of his task, and the row was badly mown.”
― Leo Tolstoy, Anna Karenina

“What is the matter with you?" asked Shcherbatsky.
"Nothing much, but there is little to be happy about in this world."
"Little? You'd better come with me to Paris instead of going to some Mulhausen or other. You'll see how jolly it will be!"
"No, I have done with that; it is time for me to die."
"That is a fine thing!" said Shcherbatsky, laughing. "I am only just beginning to live."
"Yes, I thought so too till lately; but now I know that I shall soon die."
Levin was saying what of late he had really been thinking. He saw death and the apprroach of death in everything; but the work he had begun interested him all the more. After all, he had to live his life somehow, til death came. Everything for him was wrapped in darkness; but just because of the darkness, feeling his work to be the only thread to guide him through the darkness, he seized upon it and clung to it with all his might.”
― Leo Tolstoy, Anna Karenina

“Yes, there is something in me hateful, repulsive," thought Ljewin, as he came away from the Schtscherbazkijs', and walked in the direction of his brother's lodgings. "And I don't get on with other people. Pride, they say. No, I have no pride. If I had any pride, I should not have put myself in such a position".”
― Leo Tolstoy, Anna Karenina

“I will still get angry at Ivan the coachman, I will still argue, I will express my thoughts ineptly, there will be a wall between the holy of holies of my soul and other people, even my wife; I will still blame her for my own terror and then repent of it, I will still not understand with my reason why I pray, and will go on praying - but my life now, my whole life, regardless of whatever may happen to me, each minute of it, is not only not meaningless, as it were before, but possesses the undoubted meaning of that goodness I have the power to put into it!”
― Leo Tolstoy, Anna Karenina

“Wait, wait,' he began, interrupting Oblonsky. 'Aristocratism, you say. But allow me to ask, what makes up this aristocratism of Vronsky or whoever else it may be - such aristocratism that I can be scorned? You consider Vronsky an aristocrat, but I don't. A man whose father crept out of nothing by wiliness, whose mother, God knows who she didn't have liaisons with... No, excuse me, but I consider myself an aristocrat and people like myself, who can point to three or four honest generations in their families' past, who had a high degree of education (talent and intelligence are another thing), and who never lowered themselves before anyone, never depended on anyone, as my father lived, and my grandfather. And I know many like that. You find it mean that I count the trees in the forest, while you give away thirty thousand to Ryabinin; but you'll have rent coming in and I don't know what else, while I won't, and so I value what I've inherited and worked for... We're the aristocrats, and not someone who can only exist on hand-outs from the mighty of this world and can be bought for twenty kopecks.

'But who are you attacking? I agree with you,' said Stepan Arkadyich sincerely and cheerfully, though he felt Levin included him among those who could be bought for twenty kopecks.”
― Leo Tolstoy, Anna Karenina

“I have only to go stubbornly on towards my aim, and I shall attain my end", thought Levin; "and it's something to work and take trouble for. This is not a matter of myself individually; the question of the public welfare comes into it. The whole system of culture, the chief element in the condition of people, must be completely transformed. Instead of poverty, general prosperity and content; instead of hostility, harmony and unity of interests. In short, a bloodless revolution, but a revolution of the greatest magnitude, beginning in the little circle of our district, then the province, then Russia, then the whole world. Because a just idea cannot but be fruitful. Yes, it's an aim worth working for.”
― Leo Tolstoy, Anna Karenina

“He [Vronsky] himself felt that, except that crazy fellow married to Kitty Shcherbatsky, who, quite irrelevantly had with rabid virulence told him a lot of pointless nonsense, every nobleman whose acquaintance he had made had become his partisan.”
― Leo Tolstoy

“Levin tried to drink a little coffee, and put a piece of roll into his mouth, but his mouth could do nothing with it. He took the piece out of his mouth, put on his overcoat and went out to walk about again.”
― Leo Tolstoy, Anna Karenina

“Without knowing what I am, and why I am here, it is impossible to live. Yet I cannot know that, and therefore I can't live,' he said to himself.”
― Leo Tolstoy, Anna Karenina

“Pracuje, chcę zrobić cokolwiek, a zapomniałem, iż wszystko skończy się, zapomniałem o śmierci.”
― Lew Tołstoj, Anna Karenina

“...Karısını öpmek istemiş, Kiti onu itmişti.
- Neyin var?
Kiti hem sakin görünmek, hem de onu iğnelemek isteğiyle:
- Senin keyfin yerinde... -diye söze başlamıştı.
Ancak ağzını açar açmaz anlamsız bir kıskançlığın sitemleri, pencerenin önünde oturarak hiç kımıldamadan geçirdiği bu yarım saatte onu üzen ne varsa hepsi dışarı fırlamıştı. Düğünden sonra Kiti'yi kiliseden çıkarırken anlamadığı şeyi şimdi, şu anda ilk kez açıkça anlamıştı. Kiti'nin ona sadece yakın olmadığını, aynı zamanda Kiti'nin nerede, kendisinin nerede başladığını artık bilmediğini anlamıştı. Bunu, o anda hissettiği acı veren ikiye bölünme duygusundan anlamıştı. İlk anda gücenmişti, ama hemen o saniyede Kiti tarafından incitilemeyeceğini, Kiti'nin onun ta kendisi olduğunu hissetmişti. İlk anda birdenbire sırtına güçlü bir yumruk yiyip, suçluyu bulmak için öfkeyle ve öç almak isteğiyle başını arkaya çeviren ve kazara kendi kendisine vurduğuna, ortada kızacak kimse olmadığına, buna katlanmak ve acısını azaltmak gerektiğine inanan bir adamın hissettiğine benzer bir duyguya kapılmıştı.”
― Tolstoy, Leo

“-Bu "halk" sözcüğü çok belirsiz, -dedi Levin. -Bucak katipleri, öğretmenler ve bin köylüden belki biri neyin söz konusu olduğunu biliyordur. Geri kalan seksen milyon, Mihaylıç gibi, bırak iradesini belirtmeyi, hangi konuda iradesini ifade etmesi gerektiği üzerine en küçük bir fikre bile sahip değildir. Bunun halkın iradesi olduğunu söylemeye nasıl hakkımız olabilir?”
― Leo Tolstoy, Anna Karenina

“Pero él no lo creía, porque juzgaba a los demás por sí mismo.”
― Leo Tolstoy, Anna Karenina

“For him the problem was this: 'If I don't accept the replies offered by Christianity to the questions my life presents, what solutions do I accept?' And he not only failed to find in the whole arsenal of his convictions any kind of answer, but he could not even find anything resembling an answer.”
― Leo Tolstoy, Anna Karenina

“One thing I think this is showing us is that focusing on the brain as the source of inspiration for machine learning is derived from a very specialized architecture. I’ve been suggesting that a true general purpose intelligence is much more likely to arise not from mimicking the structure of the core of the human cortex, or anything like that, but from actually taking seriously the computational principles that life has been applying since the very beginning.

CHRISTINA: Paramecia?

MICHAEL: Even before that. Bacteria biofilms. All that stuff has been solving problems in ways that we have yet to figure out. They’re able to generalize, they’re able to learn from experience with a small number of examples. They make self-models. It’s amazing what they can do. That should be the inspiration. I think the future of machine learning and AI technologies will not be based on brains, but on this much more ancient, general ability of life to solve problems in novel domains.”
― Michael Levin

“-¿Y qué? No he dejado de pensar en la muerte -dijo Levin-. Lo cierto es que tarde o temprano tenemos que morir. Y que todo es absurdo. A decir verdad, aprecio muchísimo mi idea y mi trabajo, pero en el fondo me doy cuenta de que todo este mundo nuestro no es más que una partícula de moho que ha crecido en un planeta minúsculo. Y todo eso que imaginamos tan grande, nuestras ideas, nuestras obras, no son sino granos de arena.
-Pero !eso, amigo mío, es tan viejo como el mundo!
-Desde luego . Pero, cuando acabas dándote cuenta, todo te parece insignificante. Cuando comprendes que hoy o mañana te vas a morir y que todo desaparecerá, ya nada tiene valor. Por muy importante que considere mi idea, en el fondo no deja de ser tan intrascendente, aunque se llevara a cabo, como seguir el rastro de esta osa. Y así pasamos la vida, distrayéndonos con la caza y con el trabajo, para no pensar en la muerte.”
― Tolstoi, León

“-¿Y qué? No dejó de pensar en la muerte -dijo Levin-. Lo cierto es que tarde o temprano tenemos que morir. Y que todo es absurdo. A decir verdad, aprecio muchísimo mi idea y mi trabajo, pero en el fondo me doy cuenta de que todo este mundo nuestro no es más que una partícula de moho que ha crecido en un planeta minúsculo. Y todo eso que imaginamos tan grande, nuestras ideas, nuestras obras, no son sino granos de arena.
-¡Pero !eso, amigo mío, es tan viejo como el mundo!
-Desde luego. Pero, cuando acabas de darte cuenta, todo te parece insignificante. Cuando comprendes que hoy o mañana te vas a morir y que todo desaparecerá, ya nada tiene valor. Por muy importante que considere mi idea, en el fondo no deja de ser tan intrascendente, aunque se lleve a cabo, como seguir el rastro de esta osa. Y así pasamos la vida, distrayéndonos con la caza y con el trabajo, para no pensar en la muerte.”
― Tolstoi