#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

I felt a wish never to leave that room - a wish that dawn might never come, that my present frame of mind might never change. ↗

— Leo Tolstoy

#leo-tolstoy #literature #russia #change

Tolstoy said, 'The antagonism between life and conscience may be removed either by a change of life or by a change of conscience.' Many of us have elected to adjust our consciences rather than our lives. Our powers of rationalization are unlimited. They allow us to live in luxury and indifference while others, whom we could help if we chose to, starve and go to hell. ↗

— Randy Alcorn

#change #compassion #conscience #conviction #guilt

Watergate is an immensely complicated scandal with a cast of characters as varied as a Tolstoy novel. ↗

— Bob Woodward

#characters #complicated #immensely #novel #scandal

The difference between what he had been then and what he now was, was enormous...Then he was free and fearless...now he felt himself caught in the meshes of a stupid, empty, valueless, frivolous life...He remembered how proud he was at one time of his straightforwardness, how he had made a rule of always speaking the truth...and he was now sunk deep in lies...lies considered as truth by all who surrounded him. ↗

— Leo Tolstoy

#ressurrection #life

Anna Karenina is sheer perfection as a work of art. No European work of fiction of our present day comes anywhere near it. Furthermore, the idea underlying it shows that it is ours, ours, something that belongs to us alone and that is our own property, our own national 'new word'or, at any rate, the beginning of it. ↗

— Fyodor Dostoyevsky

#dostoyevsky #tolstoy #art

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

— Gretchen Rubin

#kindness #tolstoy #beauty