Tolstoy's Quotes

#1. 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.

Lev Shestov

#2. Everyone writes in Tolstoy's shadow, whether one feels oneself to be Tolstoyan or not.

A. N. Wilson

#3. I reached over, opened it in the middle, and began reading Tolstoy's War and Peace. Nothing had changed. It was still a lousy book.

Charles Bukowski

#4. What has appealed to me most in Tolstoy's life is that he practiced what he preached and reckoned no cost too great in his pursuit of truth.

Mahatma Gandhi

#5. I myself do not believe that the Torah is any more or less the revealed Word of God than are Dante's Commedia, Shakespeare's King Lear, or Tolstoy's novels, all works of comparable literary sublimity

Harold Bloom

#6. Good teachers, like Tolstoy's happy families, are alike everywhere.

Bel Kaufman

#7. [R]eality and real people are too subtle and complicated for anybody's typewriter, even Tolstoy's, even yours, even mine.

Edward Abbey

#8. I very much enjoyed Leo Tolstoy's What is Art? I can't quote it, it's been a while, but at the end of the day, the idea is that "art that does good in the world is art, and what doesn't is not. It's propaganda or something else. It's bad."

Scott Avett

#9. Tolstoy's famous line, all happiness is alike, but each pain is painful in its own way.

Haruki Murakami

#10. Every drama requires a cast. The cast may be so huge, as in Leo Tolstoy's 'Anna Karenina,' that the author or editor provides a list of characters to keep them straight. Or it may be an intimate cast of two.

Nancy Kress

#11. I don't quite understand what Tolstoy's actual personal view of Anna is - whether he likes her or hates her, whether she's the heroine or the antiheroine.

Keira Knightley

#12. But it is Tolstoy's understanding of life that the fate of each man and woman is determined by forces beyond their control; these forces include the dictatorship of social demands.

Leo Tolstoy

#13. Vermeer's woman reading a letter is as full of latent or subliminal kitsch as Tolstoy's War and Peace.

John Bayley

#14. 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.

Raphael Soyer

#15. 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

#16. Tolstoy's so-called inconsistencies were a sign of his development and his passionate regard for truth.

Mahatma Gandhi

#17. Tolstoy's wife copied out the entire manuscript of War and Peace in longhand seven times.

David Markson

#18. Tolstoy's characters seem to come forward to meet you, very conscious of the impression they are making on one another and on the reader.

Stephen Spender

#19. I've never felt powerful enough to write a true political novel, or deeply knowledgeable enough to draw a character like, say, Tolstoy's Prince Kutuzov.

Mona Simpson

#20. Chechnya forms the bookends to Tolstoy's career. He began writing his first novel, 'Childhood,' while in Starogladovskaya in Northern Chechnya, and his final novel, 'Hadji Murad,' is set in the Russo-Chechen War of the 19th century.

Anthony Marra

#21. John Dewey was right that "failure is instructive," then Tolstoy's life is, well, an instructional gold mine.

Leo Tolstoy

#22. But the Russian writers would be packed away in mothballs and stored in our basement. I would savor the idea of Dostoevsky's, Tolstoy's and Gorki's volumes molding in the dank cellar, wisps of camphor and odors of wet earth floating above them. I

Maya Angelou

#23. As often happens between men who have chosen different pursuits, each, while in argument justifying the other's activity, despised it in the depth of his heart.

Leo Tolstoy

#24. But she was not even grateful to him for it; nothing good on Pierre's part seemed to her to be an effort, it seemed so natural for him to be kind to everyone that there was no merit in his kindness.

Leo Tolstoy

#25. It is beyond the power of the human intellect to encompass all the causes of any phenomenon. But the impulse to search into causes is inherent in man's very nature.

Leo Tolstoy

#26. 'Thou shalt not kill' does not apply to murder of one's own kind only, but to all living beings and this commandment was inscribed in the human breast long before it was proclaimed from Sinai.

Leo Tolstoy

#27. A wife's a worry, a non-wife's even worse.

Leo Tolstoy

#28. There was not a single cross or worried-looking face. All seemed to have left their cares and anxieties in the porter's room with their hats, and were all deliberately getting ready to enjoy the material blessings of life.

Leo Tolstoy

#29. To love life is to love God. Harder and more blessed than all else is to love this life in one's sufferings, in undeserved sufferings.

Leo Tolstoy

#30. There had been in his past, as in every man's, actions, recognized by him as bad, for which his conscience ought to have tormented him; but the memory of these evil actions was far from causing him so much suffering as those trivial but humiliating reminiscences.

Leo Tolstoy

#31. I love 'Anna Karenina.' It's in the top five books on my list. Tolstoy is unsurpassed in combining the grand with the trivial, that is, the small details which make up life.

Susan Minot

#32. The story told about him at Count Rostov's was true. Pierre had taken part in tying a policeman to a bear. He

Leo Tolstoy

#33. Till now I have always, thank God, been my children's friend and had their full confidence," said she, repeating the mistake of so many parents who imagine that their children have no secrets from them.

Leo Tolstoy

#34. Ah, don't grieve, little falcon,' he said with that tenderly melodious gentleness with which old Russian women speak. 'Don't grieve, little friend: you suffer an hour, you live an age! So it is, my dear. And we live here, thank God, with no offense. There's bad people, and there's good

Leo Tolstoy

#35. At that meeting he was struck for the first time by the endless variety of men's minds, which prevents a truth from ever presenting itself identically to two persons. Even

Leo Tolstoy

#36. Energy rests upon love; and come as it will, there's no forcing it.

Leo Tolstoy

#37. Moreover, during his wife's confinement, something had happened that seemed extraordinary to him. He, an unbeliever, had fallen into praying, and at the moment he prayed, he believed. But that moment had passed, and he could not make his state of mind at that moment fit into the rest of his life.

Leo Tolstoy

#38. Leo Tolstoy wrote: "One can live magnificently in this world, if one knows how to work and how to love, to work for the person one loves and to love one's work."19

Jonathan Haidt

#39. Yashvin, a gambler and a rake, a man not merely without moral principles, but of immoral principles, Yashvin was Vronsky's greatest friend in the regiment.

Leo Tolstoy

#40. Woman is deprived of rights from lack of education, and the lack of education results from the absence of rights. We must not forget that the subjection of women is so complete, and dates from such ages back that we are often unwilling to recognise the gulf that separates them from us.

Leo Tolstoy

#41. It's different for you and me. You study, you become enlightened; I study, I become confused.

Leo Tolstoy

#42. Another's wife is a white swan, and ours is bitter wormwood.

Leo Tolstoy

#43. He had lived (without being aware of it) on those spiritual truths that he had sucked in with his mother's milk, but he had thought, not merely without recognition of these truths, but studiously ignoring them.

Leo Tolstoy

#44. Unfortunately, as Tolstoy said, "Everyone wants to change the world, but no one wants to change themselves." Let's hope there are exceptions.

Anonymous

#45. All we can know is that we know nothing. And that's the height of human wisdom.

Leo Tolstoy

#46. Looking into Napoleon's eyes, Prince Andrei thought about the insignificance of grandeur, about the insignificance of life, the meaning of which no one could understand, and about the still greater insignificance of death, the meaning of which no one among the living could understand or explain.

Leo Tolstoy

#47. It's hard to love a woman and do anything.

Leo Tolstoy

#48. Has been argued with some justification that it is Anna's growing sense of bleak isolation that is the essence of her tragedy. There

Leo Tolstoy

#49. I sit on a man's back, choking him and making him carry me, and yet assure myself and others that I am very sorry for him and wish to ease his lot by all possible means - except by getting off his back.

Leo Tolstoy

#50. A moment's pain can be a lifetime's gain.

Leo Tolstoy

#51. Tolstoy may not be showing that much of Russia at that time even. It's hard to tell. You tend to associate the quality of the period with what's lasted - what's still good. And that quality becomes the whole period.

Donald Judd

#52. Men need only trust in Christ's teaching and obey it, and there will be peace on earth.

Leo Tolstoy

#53. So that's what it is!" he suddenly exclaimed aloud. "What joy!

Leo Tolstoy

#54. If string isn't tight and you try to break it, it's very hard to do. But tighten it to the utmost and put just the weight of your finger on it, and it will break.

Leo Tolstoy

#55. That's the way. Lay me down like a stone, O God, and raise me up like a loaf,' he muttered as he lay down, pulling his coat over him.

Leo Tolstoy

#56. As though I had been going steadily downhill, imagining that I was going uphill. So it was in fact. In public opinion I was going uphill, and steadily as I got up it, life was ebbing away from me ... And now the work's done, there's only death.

Leo Tolstoy

#57. It's a different thing to write a love story now than in the time of Jane Austen, Eliot, or Tolstoy. One of the problems is that once divorce is possible, once break-ups are possible, it can all become a little less momentous.

Mona Simpson

#58. 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

#59. We are conscious of the force of man's life, and we call it freedom

Leo Tolstoy

#60. Oh God! what am I to do if I love nothing but fame and men's esteem?

Leo Tolstoy

#61. It all depends with how much judgment and knowledge the thing's done.

Leo Tolstoy

#62. Alexey Alexandrovitch was standing face to face with life, with the possibility of his wife's loving someone other than himself, and this seemed to him very irrational and incomprehensible because it was life itself.

Leo Tolstoy

#63. Religions are the exponents of the highest comprehension of life ... within a given age in a given society ... a basis for evaluating human sentiments. If feelings bring people nearer to the religion's ideal ... they are good; if these estrange them from it, and oppose it, they are bad.

Leo Tolstoy

#64. The worker picked up Pakhom's spade, dug a grave, and buried him - six feet from head to heel, exactly the amount of land a man needs.

Leo Tolstoy

#65. But men are now united in states; that work is done; why now maintain exclusive devotion to one's own state, when this produces terrible evils for all.

Leo Tolstoy

#66. The artist's mission must not be to produce an irrefutable solution to a problem, but to compel us to love life in all its countless and inexhaustible manifestations.

Leo Tolstoy

#67. To live an honest life you have to strive hard, get involved, fight, make mistakes, begin something and give it up, begin again, struggle endlessly, and suffer loss. As for tranquility - it's spiritual baseness.

Leo Tolstoy

#68. One must do one of two tings: either admit that the existing order of society is just, and then stick up for one's rights in it;or acknowledge that you are enjoying unjust privileges, as i do, and then enjoy them and be satisfied.

Leo Tolstoy

#69. Nikolushka and his upbringing, Andre, and religion were Princess Marya's comforts and joys; but, besides that, since every human being needs his personal hope, Princess Marya had in the deepest recesses of her soul a hidden dream and hope, which provided the main comfort of her life.

Leo Tolstoy

#70. It is not beauty that endears, it's love that makes us see beauty.

Leo Tolstoy

#71. It's not given to people to judge what's right or wrong. People have eternally been mistaken and will be mistaken, and in nothing more than in what they consider right and wrong.

Leo Tolstoy

#72. Gaiety and grief and despair and tenderness and triumph followed one another without any connection, like the emotions of a madman. And those emotions, like a madman's, sprang up quite unexpectedly.

Leo Tolstoy

#73. And do you know, there's less charm in life, when one thinks of death, but there's more peace.

Leo Tolstoy

#74. In affirming my belief in Christ's teaching, I could not help explaining why I do not believe, and consider as mistaken, the Church's doctrine, which is usually called Christianity.

Leo Tolstoy

#75. Oh God. He's quoting Tolstoy and touching me. I'm done for.

Helena Hunting

#76. A king is history's slave.

Leo Tolstoy

#77. The absence of suffering, the satisfaction of one's needs and consequent freedom in the choice of one's occupation, that is, of one's way of life, now seemed to Pierre to be indubitably man's highest happiness.

Leo Tolstoy

#78. She doesn't stand up because her legs are too short. She's a very bad figure.

Leo Tolstoy

#79. The higher a man's conception of God, the better will he know Him. And the better he knows God, the nearer will he draw to Him, imitating His goodness, His mercy, and His love of man.

Leo Tolstoy

#80. That's my one desire, to be caught," answered Vronsky, with his serene,
good-humored smile. "If I complain of anything it's only that I'm not caught
enough, to tell the truth. I begin to lose hope.

Leo Tolstoy

#81. If you want to consume the cream of Christ's philosophy, then don't read the Bible, read Tolstoy.

Abhijit Naskar

#82. For the artist treating of man's relation to all sides of life there cannot and should not be heroes, but there should be men.

Leo Tolstoy

#83. Tolstoy was the most gifted writer who ever lived. It's like he stuck a pen in his heart and it didn't even go through his mind on its way to the page.

Mel Brooks

#84. At the men's end of the table the talk grew more and more animated. The colonel told them that the declaration of war had already appeared in Petersburg and that a copy, which he had himself seen, had that day been forwarded by courier to the commander in chief.

Leo Tolstoy

#85. My brother's death: wise, good, serious, he fell ill while still a young man, suffered for more than a year, and died painfully, not understanding why he had lived and still less why he had to die. No theories could give me, or him, any reply to these questions during his slow and painful dying.

Leo Tolstoy

#86. But that's the whole aim of civilization: to make everything a source of enjoyment.

Leo Tolstoy

#87. Therein is the whole business of one's life; to seek out and save in the soul that which is perishing.

Leo Tolstoy

#88. Perhaps it's because I appreciate all I have so much that I don't worry about what I haven't got.

Leo Tolstoy

#89. If there is a God and future life, there is truth and good, and man's highest happiness consists in striving to attain them. We must live, we must love, and we must believe that we live not only today on this scrap of earth, but have lived and shall live

Leo Tolstoy

#90. And however much the princess was assured that in our time young people themselves must settle their fate, she was unable to believe it, as she would have been unable to believe that in anyone's time the best toys for five-year-old children would be loaded pistols.

Leo Tolstoy

#91. We must live. We must love. And we must believe that there's more to it all than our lives on this scrap of earth.

Leo Tolstoy

#92. Art is not a pleasure, a solace, or an amusement; art is a great matter. Art is an organ of human life, transmitting man's reasonable perception into feeling.

Leo Tolstoy

#93. As is so often the case, was not so much annoyed at the fact itself as at the way in which he had met his wife's words.

Leo Tolstoy

#94. I feel that I am entitled to my share of lightheartedness and there is nothing wrong with enjoying one's self simply, like a boy.

Leo Tolstoy

#95. These stupid chignons! There's no getting at the real daughter. One simply strokes the bristles of dead women.

Leo Tolstoy

#96. It doesn't matter what you read. What matters is you read. Whether it's Tolstoy or Twilight, Kierkegaard or Betty and Veronica, keep reading, and don't ever let somebody else - anybody - have a say about, or try to control, what you choose to learn from and/or escape into.

Trent Zelazny

#97. Ferreting in one's soul, one often ferrets out something that might have lain there unnoticed.

Leo Tolstoy

#98. The superfluity of the comforts of like destroys all joy in satisfying one's needs, while great freedom in the choice of occupation ... is just what makes the choice of occupation insoluble difficult and destroys the need and even the possibility of having an occupation. p 1209

Leo Tolstoy

#99. Before, when I was ordered to consider him intelligent, I kept on trying to and I considered myself stupid for not seeing how intelligent he was; but the moment I said, "he's stupid," but said it in a whisper, everything became quite clear.

Leo Tolstoy

#100. There's a way out of every situation.

Leo Tolstoy