#tolstoy

All the diversity, all the charm, and all the beauty of life are made up of light and shade. ↗

— Leo Tolstoy

#beauty #charm #diversity #leo-tolstoy #beauty

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

#dying #karenina #leo #levin #tolstoy

I went through a whole phase when I was younger of being obsessed with Tolstoy and Kafka and Camus, all those really, beautiful, dark depressing books. ↗

— Jessica Pare

#being #books #dark #depressing #i

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

#art #goethe #karenina #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

#love #tolstoy #love

She put both her hands on his shoulders and gazed at him long, with a deep look of ecstasy and yet searchingly. She scrutinized his face to make up for the time she had not seen him. She compared, as she did at every interview with him, the image her fancy painted of him (incomparably finer than, and impossible in actual existence) with his real self ↗

— Leo Tolstoy

#leo-tolstoy #love #love

He looked at her as a man might look at a faded flower he had plucked, in which it was difficult for him to trace the beauty that had made him pick and so destroy it ↗

— Leo Tolstoy

#despair #leo-tolstoy #love #sadness #beauty

Just think! This whole world of ours is only a speck of mildew sprung up on a tiny planet, yet we think we can have something great - thoughts,, actions! They are all but grains of sand ↗

— Leo Tolstoy

#leo-tolstoy #life #life-philosophy #life

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

#humor #moroseness #russia #satire #sorrow

The acquisition by dishonest means and cunning,' said Levin, feeling that he was incapable of clearly defining the borderline between honesty and dishonesty. 'Like the profits made by banks,' he went on. 'This is evil, I mean, the acquisition of enormous fortunes without work, as it used to be with the spirit monopolists. Only the form has changed. Le roi est mort, vive le roi! Hardly were the monopolies abolished before railways and banks appeared: just another way of making money without work. ↗

— Leo Tolstoy

#banks #earnings #labor #leo-tolstoy #monopolies