#tolstoy

The greatest human achievement is love. ↗

— Leo Tolstoy

#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

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

— A. N. Wilson

#feels #oneself #shadow #tolstoy #whether

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

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

— Gretchen Rubin

#kindness #tolstoy #beauty

Love is life. All, everything that I understand, I understand only because I love. Everything is, everything exists, only because I love. Everything is united by it alone ↗

— Leo Tolstoy

#life #love #prince-andrew #tolstoy #war-and-peace

Let them judge me as they like, I could deceive them, but myself I cannot deceive...and strange to say, in this acknowledgement of his baseness there was something painful yet joyful and quieting. More than once in Nekhlyudov's life there had been what he called, 'a cleansing of the soul.' A state of mind in which, after a long period of sluggish inner life...he began to clear out all the rubbish that had accumulated in his soul and caused the cessation of true life. After such an awakening, Nekhlyudov always made some rules for himself...wrote in his diary, began afresh... ↗

— Leo Tolstoy

#ressurrection #life

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

#american-indians #humor #tolstoy #family

When I was in prison, I was wrapped up in all those deep books. That Tolstoy crap - people shouldn't read that stuff. ↗

— Mike Tyson

#crap #deep #i #people #prison

…the role of the disappointed lover of a maiden or of any single woman might be ridiculous; but the role of a man who was pursuing a married woman, and who made it the purpose of his life at all cost to draw her into adultery, was one which had in it something beautiful and dignified and could never be ridiculous…. ↗

— Leo Tolstoy

#tolstoy #beauty