Quotes About Tolstoy

After reading Tolstoy's lengthy essay "On Life" in 1889, Ernest Crosby, a thirty-three-year-old American diplomat who was working in Egypt at the time, decided that diplomacy wasn't his calling and instead dedicated the next twenty-seven years of his life to writing and lecturing about Tolstoy throughout the United States.

Not reason. Reason discovered the struggle for existence, and the law that requires us to oppress all who hinder the satisfaction of our desires. That is the deduction of reason. But loving one's neighbor reason could never discover, because it's irrational.

La razón no ha descubierto que se amase al prójimo, porque eso no es razonable. Constantino Levin

Alexei Alexandrovich, in my opinion, is simply stupid. I say it in a whisper...Doesn't that make everything clear? Before, when I was told to find him intelligent, I kept searching and found myself stupid for not seeing his intelligence; but as soon as I say "He's stupid" in a whisper - everything becomes so clear, doesn't it?

Much sand has run out since then, many recollections of the past have faded from my memory or become blurred in indistinct visions, and poor Grisha himself has long since reached the end of his pilgrimage; but the impression which he produced upon me, and the feelings which he aroused in my breast, will never leave my mind. O truly Christian Grisha, your faith was so strong that you could feel the actual presence of God; your love so great that the words fell of themselves from your lips.

Countess Bezukhova quite deserved her reputation of being a fascinating woman. She could say what she did not think—especially what was flattering—quite simply and naturally.

The question of other religions and their relations to Divinity I have no right to decide, and no possibility of deciding.

if there are as many minds as there are men, then there are as many kinds of love as there are hearts.

Only a man devoid of the sense of measure and of taste could produce such types as "Titus Andronicus" or "Troilus and Cressida,

I think ... if there are as many minds as there are men, then there are as many kinds of love as there are hearts.

European countries unresistingly submitted to the introduction of general military service--i.e., to a state of slavery involving a degree of humiliation and submission incomparably worse than any slavery of the ancient world.

I don't think anything," she said, "but 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….

They certified that I was sane; but I know that I am mad." This confession gives us the key to what is most important and significant in Tolstoy's hidden life.

Count Tolstoy preached inaction. It seems he had no need. We "inact" remarkably. Idleness, just that idleness Tolstoy dreamed of, a free, conscious idling that despises labour, this is one of the chief characteristics of our time.

There are two men in Tolstoy. He is a mystic and he is also a realist. He is addicted to the practice of a pietism that for all its sincerity is nothing if not vague and sentimental; and he is the most acute and dispassionate of observers, the most profound and earnest student of character and emotion.

the author Leo Tolstoy, who maintained that leaders and generals had minimal influence on the course of history. To make his point, Tolstoy included in his novel War and Peace fictitious accounts of battles in which generals issue orders, but the orders are irrelevant to what is actually happening on the battlefield.

If Tolstoy were alive today and working at Panopticon Insurance, he'd say that all insurance companies are the same, then throw himself through an eighteenth story window and plunge to his death in a hail of glass and shattered dignity (70).

Tolstoy's definition of art is the inverse of the truth; the task of art is to transform not perception into feeling, but feeling into perception.

Tolstoy is one of the greatest artists in history, but he finally became infused with the idea of the uselessness of art. He gave himself to his own kind of religion.

I was nothing more than a thug with Tolstoy in my pocket.

Love and Death had been a broad comedy. Eisenstein and Tolstoy in cartoon.

But it rained all the time, fog covered the fields, and by then he was reading Tolstoy. There were some books that reached through the noise of life to grab you by the collar and speak only of the truest things. A Confession was a book like that.

He thought of Count Tolstoy's book and how, after the horrific, bloody battle of Borodino, the war just seemed to peter out, ending not in bravery but in retreat—exhaustion and the change of seasons having as much to do with the final Russian victory as any decisive action.

Leo Tolstoy's nonfiction book The Kingdom of God Is Within You, the culmination of thirty years of reflections on Christianity, was banned in Russia—