Quotes About Tolstoy

Did you ever read Carlo Levi?" "No." "You should—if you like Tolstoy. He wrote beautifully about Italian peasants. My people, once. He had a soul like Tolstoy. 'The future has an ancient heart.' I think I have that right.

Tolstoy was wrong. Kings are not the slaves of history. History is the slave of kings.

Men are so accustomed to maintaining external order by violence that they cannot conceive of life being possible without violence.

I am not a fatalist. I have just been reading War and Peace and Tolstoy is such a fatalist. I think people can make a difference... I am an optimist who worries a lot.

We are not immune to the lure of wonder and mystery and awe: we have music and art and literature, and find that the serious ethical dilemmas are better handled by Shakespeare and Tolstoy and Schiller and Dostoyevsky and George Eliot than in the mythical morality tales of the holy books.

Perhaps you've read Tolstoy's Hadji Mourat? Perhaps you've read The Cossacks? Perhaps you've read the story "A Prisoner in the Caucasus"? They were written by a Russian count. While Dostoyevsky was a Lithuanian. As long as the Tartars remain in existence, they will pray to Allah on behalf of Tolstoy.

I am a master of fiction. I am also the greatest crime writer who ever lived. I am to the crime novel in specific what Tolstoy is to the Russian novel and what Beethoven is to music.

Russia - the country of Tolstoy, Stanislavski, Raskolnikov, and other great and good men.

The decrees of society are temporary ones; what Tolstoy is interested in are the eternal demands of morality.

Tolstoy's prose keeps pace with our pulses, his characters seem to move with the same swing as the people passing under our window while we sit reading his book.

Nothing,' wrote Tolstoy, 'can make our life, or the lives of other people, more beautiful than perpetual kindness.

Tolstoy may be right about happy and unhappy families, but in ballet, it works the opposite way: All good ballets are different from each other and all bad ones are alike, at least in one crucial respect - they're all empty.

I think Tolstoy had an unbelievably complicated relationship with women.

Tolstoy teaches us that compassion is of value and enriches our life only when compassion is severe, which is to say when we can perceive everything that is good and bad about a character but are still able to feel that the sum of us as human beings is probably a little more good than awful. In any case, good or bad, it reminds us that life is like a gladiators' arena for the soul and so we can feel strengthened by those who endure, and feel awe and pity for those who do not.

My aim is to explore Russian culture in the same way Tolstoy presents Natasha's dance: as a series of encounters or creative social acts which were performed and understood in many different ways.

the reader will find here that works of literature, like War and Peace, are intercut with episodes from daily life (childhood, marriage, religious life, responses to the landscape, food and drinking habits, attitudes to death) where the outlines of this national consciousness may be discerned. These are the episodes where we may find, in life, the unseen threads of a common Russian sensibility, such as Tolstoy had imagined in his celebrated dancing scene.

Reading the very best writers—let us say Homer, Dante, Shakespeare, Tolstoy—is not going to make us better citizens. Art is perfectly useless, according to the sublime Oscar Wilde, who was right about everything. He also told us that all bad poetry is sincere. Had I the power to do so, I would command that these words be engraved above every gate at every university, so that each student might ponder the splendor of the insight.

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

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

Tolstoy's belief that true understanding only existed in the present and events were decided "on the instant." This is why Kutuzov's best advice before the battle was to get a good night's sleep: immediate attentiveness to unfolding possibilities was going to be more valuable than forward planning.11

The hero of my tale, whom I love with all the power of my soul, whom I have tried to portray in all his beauty, who has been, is, and will be beautiful, is Truth.

War on the other hand is such a terrible thing, that no man, especially a Christian man, has the right to assume the responsibility of starting it.

I think... if it is true that there are as many minds as there are heads, then there are as many kinds of love as there are hearts.

I always loved you, and if one loves anyone, one loves the whole person, just as they are and not as one would like them to be. -Dolly