Tolstoy Quotes

“Everyone thinks of changing the world, but no one thinks of changing himself.”
― Leo Tolstoy

“I've always loved you, and when you love someone, you love the whole person, just as he or she is, and not as you would like them to be.”
― Leo Tolstoy, Anna Karenina

“Freddie experienced the sort of abysmal soul-sadness which afflicts one of Tolstoy's Russian peasants when, after putting in a heavy day's work strangling his father, beating his wife, and dropping the baby into the city's reservoir, he turns to the cupboards, only to find the vodka bottle empty.”
― P.G. Wodehouse , The Best of Wodehouse: An Anthology

“I took a speed-reading course and read War and Peace in twenty minutes. It involves Russia.”
― Woody Allen

“He stepped down, avoiding any long look at her as one avoids long looks at the sun, but seeing her as one sees the sun, without looking.”
― Leo Tolstoy, Anna Karenina

“Nothing,' wrote Tolstoy, 'can make our life, or the lives of other people, more beautiful than perpetual kindness.”
― Gretchen Rubin, The Happiness Project

“And not only the pride of intellect, but the stupidity of intellect. And, above all, the dishonesty, yes, the dishonesty of intellect. Yes, indeed, the dishonesty and trickery of intellect.”
― Leo Tolstoy, Anna Karenina

“Just as a painter needs light in order to put the finishing touches to his picture, so I need an inner light, which I feel I never have enough of in the autumn.”
― Leo Tolstoy

“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

“The world is kept alive only by heretics: the heretic Christ, the heretic Copernicus, the heretic Tolstoy. Our symbol of faith is heresy. (“Tomorrow”)”
― Yevgeny Zamyatin

“Anna Karenina is sheer perfection as a work of art. No European work of fiction of our present day comes anywhere near it. Furthermore, the idea underlying it shows that it is ours, ours, something that belongs to us alone and that is our own property, our own national 'new word'or, at any rate, the beginning of it.”
― Fyodor Dostoyevsky

“In the post-Warhol era a single gesture such as uncrossing one's legs will have more significance than all the pages in War and Peace.”
― J.G. Ballard, The Atrocity Exhibition

“Gordie, the white boy genius, gave me this book by a Russian dude named Tolstoy, who wrote, 'Happy families are all alike; every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way.' Well, I hate to argue with a Russian genius, but Tolstoy didn't know Indians, and he didn't know that all Indian families are unhappy for the same exact reasons: the frikkin' booze.”
― Sherman Alexie, The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian

“The Lord had given them the day and the Lord had given them the strength. And the day and the strength had been dedicated to labor, and the labor was its reward. Who was the labor for? What would be its fruits? These were irrelevant and idle questions.”
― Leo Tolstoy, Anna Karenina

“Several times I asked myself, "Can it be that I have overlooked something, that there is something which I have failed to understand? Is it not possible that this state of despair is common to everyone?" And I searched for an answer to my questions in every area of knowledge acquired by man. For a long time I carried on my painstaking search; I did not search casually, out of mere curiosity, but painfully, persistently, day and night, like a dying man seeking salvation. I found nothing.”
― Leo Tolstoy

“An artist must know the reality he is depicting in its minutest detail. In my opinion we have only one shining example of that - Count Leo Tolstoy.”
― Fyodor Dostoyevsky

“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.”
― Louis Menand

“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.”
― Leo Tolstoy, Anna Karenina

“Art is bad when ‘you see the intent and get put off.’ (Goethe) In Tolstoy one is unaware of the intent, and sees only the thing itself.
from the book, On Retranslating A Russian Classic Anna Karenina by Leo Tolstoy”
― Joel Carmichael

“I was nothing more than a thug with Tolstoy in my pocket.”
― David Adams Richards, Mercy Among the Children

“The whole detachment was so quite that I could distinctly hear all the mingling sounds of night, so full of enchanting mystery: the mournful howling of distant jackals, now like a despairing lament, now like laughter; the sonorous, monotonous song of crickets, frogs, quails; a rumbling noise whose cause baffled me and which seemed to be coming even nearer; and all of Nature's barely audible nocturnal sounds that defy explanation or definition and merge in one rich, beautiful harmony that we call the stillness of the night.”
― Leo Tolstoy, The Death of Ivan Ilych and Other Stories

“In addition to bearing him thirteen children, Soya was privileged to copy the 1,225-page War and Peace by hand eight times while Tolstoy was editing it, because Tolstoy needed clean drafts to send along to the publisher. She also helped him work on the less famous but equally essential book Resurrection about the many women he cheated on with her. In the final weeks of his life, the increasingly radical Tolstoy left his wife without telling her, refused to see her when she tracked him down, and then died ij a train station.
But at least Soya was comforted by the fact Tolstoy also made sure that they never had any money. At this point he had already freed his serfs, renounced his title, and given away most of his wealth to the poor. Instead of his wife and kids, he left the entirety of his estate and future royalties to the fringe Doukhobor spiritual movement. Tolstoy was selected for the first Nobel Prize in Literature in 1901, but he turned it down because he knew the prize money would complicate things in his life, What could a man with a wife and about a dozen children possibly need money for?”
― Dana Schwartz, The White Man's Guide to White Male Writers of the Western Canon

“Tattoos are a uniform you wear all the time. They let the world know you are different, just like everyone else who has more ink than a Tolstoy novel.”
― Jarod Kintz, I design saxophone music in blocks, like Stonehenge

“All the evil in man, one would think, should disappear on contact with Nature, the most spontaneous expression of beauty and goodness.”
― Leo Tolstoy, The Death of Ivan Ilych & Other Stories

“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.”
― Andrea Dworkin, Intercourse

“Ya gerçekten de yaşamam gerektiği gibi yaşamadıysam ve bilinçli olarak seçtiğim yaşamım yanlışsa ..”
― Lev Tolstoy, The Death of Ivan Ilyich

“La vida, serie de crecientes sufrimientos, vuela cada vez más velozmente hacia su fin, que es el sufrimiento más horrible.”
― Léon Tolstoi, The Death of Ivan Ilych

“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.”
― Tolstoy, Leo,, What Is Art?

“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.”
― Will Eaves, Murmur

“За работой я часто разговариваю с Львом Толстым. Мне раньше всегда казалось, что он как никто умел чувствовать и любить землю. Но став крестьянином, я понимаю, что Толстой чувствовал и любил сверху, по-барски. Крестьянин любить земли не может. Он, если хотите, любит ее, но так, как корова любит траву, которую ест, как лошадь любит дорогу, по которой бежит. То есть живет землей. Став сам мужиком, я хорошо теперь знаю эту человеческую особь. До чего он, мужик, глух, нем, жесток, первобытен и всегда хитер, как хитры окружающие его животные, и нечестен, как нечестна с ним природа. Мужик должен быть таковым, ибо таковы силы земли, иначе мужику с землей и не сжиться, и не справиться. Он с рождения знает неблагостность своей земли. Мужик всегда сумеречен, суеверен и никогда не может быть истинно религиозен, оставляя это пастухам, поэтам, бродягам.”
― Роман Гуль, Я унес Россию