"Tolstoy" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... almost frightening, that nothing important was being said or would be done. But this she knew to be impudent. On Sunday evenings at home people talked about a future existence, about Nietzsche, Tolstoy, Chinese pictures, post-impressionism, and would suddenly grow hot and furious about peace, and Strauss, justice, marriage, and De Maupassant, and whether people were losing their souls through materialism, and sometimes one of them would get up and walk about the room. But to-night the only ...
— Forsyte Saga • John Galsworthy
... leading members of the great circle of Russian writers who, in the middle of the nineteenth century, gathered around the Sovremmenik (Contemporary) under Nekrasov's editorship—a circle including Turgenev, Dostoyevsky, Tolstoy, Byelinsky, and Herzen. He had not the marked genius of the first three of these; but that he is so much less known to the western reader is perhaps also due to the fact that there was nothing sensational either in his life or his literary method. His strength was in ...
— The Precipice • Ivan Goncharov
... with which Souvarow was to operate against Massena from this time were the thirty thousand Russians he had with him, thirty thousand others detached from the reserve army commanded by Count Tolstoy in Galicia, who were to be led to join him in Switzerland by General Korsakoff, about thirty thousand Austrians under General Hotze, and lastly, five or six thousand French emigrants under the Prince de Conde in all, an army of ninety or ninety-five thousand men. The Austrians ...
— CELEBRATED CRIMES, COMPLETE - VANINKA • ALEXANDRE DUMAS, PERE
... Safti, my faithful one-eyed Arab guide, and after three long days of riding and talking—as I had feared—Maeterlink and Tolstoy, Henley and Verlaine (this last being utterly condemned by Marnier as a man of weak character and degraded life) we saw the towers of Beni-Kouidar aspiring above the shifting sands, the tufted summits of the thousands of palm-trees, and heard the dull beating ...
— Desert Air - 1905 • Robert Hichens
... Count Tolstoy is said to have been interested in it. Applications have been received from the Hague for particulars of the Army methods in the matter. Similar work is being carried out in Vienna, not by the Army, but on its lines. The Army has ...
— Regeneration • H. Rider Haggard
... to him: "This is the mark of the blow you gave me the day before yesterday, when you knocked me off my horse; you see it is on the right side of my face and head; now take the cane and give me another blow on the left side"? Tolstoy (my favourite author, by the way) would have answered: "Yes, certainly it would have been better for you—better for your soul." Nevertheless, I still ask myself: "Would it?" and if this incident should come before me half a second ...
— Far Away and Long Ago • W. H. Hudson
... introduction of Lyeskov, the famous Russian writer, and contemporary of Turgenev and Tolstoy to English readers. His powerful realism should attract the many readers interested ...
— In the Mayor's Parlour • J. S. (Joseph Smith) Fletcher
... are often witnessed within the life of one individual. For instance, Leo Tolstoy, a great and good man, at one time a sensualist, has now turned ascetic; a common evolution in the lives of the saints. But excellent as this man is, there is yet a grave imperfection in his cosmos which to a degree vitiates the truth he desires ...
— Love, Life & Work • Elbert Hubbard
... we have seen, art is in its very origin social, and social means human and collective. Moral and social are, in their final analysis, the same. That human, collective emotion, out of which we have seen the choral dance arise, is in its essence moral; that is, it unites. "Art," says Tolstoy, "has this characteristic, that it unites people." In this conviction, as we shall later see, he anticipates the modern movement of the ...
— Ancient Art and Ritual • Jane Ellen Harrison
... equally at home in the clubs of London and the Continent, the Grand Hotel at Yokohama, and the selector's shanties in the Never-Never country. He had shot big game in Siam, pearled in the Paumotus, visited Tolstoy, seen the Passion Play, and crossed the Andes on mule-back; while he was a living directory of the ...
— Adventure • Jack London
... named "The Abyss" appeared and created a sensation immediately. Even Countess Tolstoy joined in the dispute which raged over this story, attacking it as matter unfit for literature. But the verdict of Andreyev's generation was in his favor. Since then nearly every new work of his has been received as an important event in Russia ...
— Savva and The Life of Man • Leonid Andreyev
... London Police Courts. The Amateur Poacher. The Bancrofts. At the Works. Mexico as I Saw It. Eighteenth Century Vignettes. The Great Andes of the Equator. The Early History of C. J. Fox. Through the Heart of Patagonia. Browning as a Religious Teacher. Life of Tolstoy. Paris to New York. Life of Lewis Carroll. A Naturalist in the Guianas. The Mantle of the East. Letters of Dr. John Brown. Jubilee Book of Cricket. By Desert Ways to Baghdad. Fields, Factories, and Workshops. Some Old Love Stories. ...
— Through Finland in Carts • Ethel Brilliana Alec-Tweedie
... this reason, I met him on Broadway one night when I was out of heart, luck, tobacco and place. He was all silk hat, diamonds and front. He was all front. If you had gone behind him you would have only looked yourself in the face. I looked like a cross between Count Tolstoy and a June lobster. I was out of luck. I had—but let me lay my eyes ...
— Strictly Business • O. Henry
... D'azeglio "Pastor Fido," "Aminta," "Romola," "Yeast," "Paul Ferroll" Erckmann-chatrian, Bjorstjerne Bjornson Tourguenief, Auerbach Certain Preferences and Experiences Valdes, Galdos, Verga, Zola, Trollope, Hardy Tolstoy ...
— Henry James, Jr. • William Dean Howells
... his Creator is but an impoverished fragment of the full philosophic doctrine; the true Puritan was equally clear that no singer or story-teller or fiddler must translate the voice of God to him into the tongues of terrestrial beauty. It is notable that the one Puritan man of genius in modern times, Tolstoy, did accept this full conclusion; denounced all music as a mere drug, and forbade his own admirers to read his own admirable novels. Now, the English Puritans were not only Puritans but Englishmen, and therefore did not always shine in clearness of head; as we shall see, true Puritanism ...
— A Short History of England • G. K. Chesterton
... from the meeting. There was a priest who spoke, a man curiously like Tolstoy. (He had, no doubt, Ainu blood in him.) He wore the stiff buttoned-up jacket of the primary school teacher and spoke modestly. "Formerly the rice fields of my village suffered very much from bad irrigation," he said, "but when that was ...
— The Foundations of Japan • J.W. Robertson Scott
... and Present burnt with similar flame; so did Ruskin's Unto this Last and the series of Fors Clavigera; so did Mazzini's God and the People, Karl Marx's Kapital, Henry George's Progress and Poverty, Tolstoy's What shall we do? and so did Proudhon's Qu'est ce que la Propriete? at the time of its birth. Nor from such a list could one exclude Uncle Tom's Cabin, by which Mrs. Beecher Stowe anticipated the deed of Harper's Ferry nine ...
— Essays in Rebellion • Henry W. Nevinson
... superstition, pardonable in the ignorant but unworthy of the educated. Those who hold this view look down with mild contempt upon such as give to religion a definite place in their thoughts and lives. They assume an intellectual superiority and often take little pains to conceal the assumption. Tolstoy administers to the "cultured crowd" (the words quoted are his) a severe rebuke when he declares that the religious sentiment rests not upon a superstitious fear of the invisible forces of nature, but upon man's consciousness ...
— The Art of Public Speaking • Dale Carnagey (AKA Dale Carnegie) and J. Berg Esenwein
... Lazaruses would sing their "dumps so dull and heavy," and the rest of the performers would exert themselves to produce exhilaration. Even among the upper classes it was long the custom at this time of year for the young people to dress up and visit their neighbours in disguise. Thus in Count Tolstoy's "Peace and War," a novel which aims at giving a true account of the Russia of the early part of the present century, there is a charming description of a visit of this kind paid by the younger members ...
— Christmas: Its Origin and Associations - Together with Its Historical Events and Festive Celebrations During Nineteen Centuries • William Francis Dawson
... persons proclaiming that something or other is wrong. Mr. Bernard Shaw denounces meat and has been understood to denounce marriage. Ibsen is said to have anathematized almost everything (by those who have not read his works). Mr. MacCabe and Mr. Blatchford think that, on the whole, there is no God, and Tolstoy told us that nearly everything we did, and quite all we wanted to do, was opposed to the spirit of Christ's teaching. Auberon Herbert disapproved of law, and John Davidson disapproved of life. Herbert Spencer objected to government, Passive Resisters to State education, and various educational ...
— G. K. Chesterton, A Critical Study • Julius West
... of genius that we do possess have been written by converted aristocrats, like Tolstoy, and have a little of the fanaticism and over-emphasis of the convert. Or they represent and share the turgidity of the minds they interpret, like some of the work of Walt Whitman. All this is true, and ...
— Definitions • Henry Seidel Canby
... Kipling's poems. (Think of considering Kipling's poems revolutionary! Indeed, think of considering some of them poems!). We debated from still more divergent viewpoints over the novels of d'Annunzio. In college, in my last year or two, some of us even adopted the views of Tolstoy in his What is Art? and under the urge of this new sociological passion we took volunteer classes in night schools. I remember instructing a group of Jewish youths in the principles of oral debate, or, rather, debating the principles ...
— Penguin Persons & Peppermints • Walter Prichard Eaton
... great campaigns developed in a totally unexpected manner, quite different to his original conception, but he always claimed that his constant success was due to the initial correct direction and impulse which he always imparted to his armies. Tolstoy states that the only directions he gave at Borodino, three in number, were never carried out, and could never, as the battle developed, have been carried out. I have not verified the great Russian ...
— 1914 • John French, Viscount of Ypres
... of Berlin in February, 1912, in which the end of the German Empire is announced for the year 1913. Next, we have various predictions uttered by Mme. de Thebes, by Dom Bosco, by the Blessed Andrew Bobola, by Korzenicki, the Polish monk, by Tolstoy, by Brother Hermann and so on, which are even less interesting; and lastly the prophecy of "Brother Johannes," published by M. Josephin Peladan in the Figaro of 16 September, 1914, which contains no evidence of genuineness and must therefore meanwhile be regarded merely as an ingenious ...
— The Wrack of the Storm • Maurice Maeterlinck
... types of universality, one by exclusion, the other by inclusion. Communists like Tolstoy demand that art express only those feelings that are already common, the religious and moral; they would exclude all values that have not become those of the race. But this is to diminish the importance of art; for ...
— The Principles Of Aesthetics • Dewitt H. Parker
... resolved to sit by it, and, perhaps, skim through a book. Tina seldom read—in Moscow, all her evenings were spent at cards. She remembered, however, that somebody had told her repeatedly, and emphatically, that she ought to read Tolstoy's "Resurrection," and she had actually brought it with her. Now she would wade through it. But whether it was the heat of the fire, or the lateness of the hour, or both, her senses grew more and more drowsy, and before she had begun to ...
— Werwolves • Elliott O'Donnell
... improved by grazing, or taking their food slowly and continuously, after the manner of cows. And he said that he had, with the most encouraging results, turned city men out on all fours in a field covered with veal cutlets. Then Tolstoy and the Humanitarians said that the world was growing more merciful, and therefore no one would ever desire to kill. And Mr. Mick not only became a vegetarian, but at length declared vegetarianism doomed ("shedding," as ...
— The Napoleon of Notting Hill • Gilbert K. Chesterton
... and more profoundly poetic, and yet penetrated, especially in Tolstoy and Dostoievsky, with an intensity of moral conviction beside which the ethical fervour of George Eliot seems an ineffectual fire, was one of the roots of the Russian Novel; which also reached its climax in the third quarter of the century. But though it concurred with ...
— Recent Developments in European Thought • Various
... that a logical mind reared in such an environment should have espoused the principle of non-killing. In his western education Gandhi became acquainted with The Sermon on the Mount, and the writings of Tolstoy and Thoreau, but he tells us himself that he was attracted to these philosophies because they expressed ideas in which ...
— Introduction to Non-Violence • Theodore Paullin
... said the older lady, with a smile, "you must not read so much of—of Tolstoy and other horrible writers like him. What would Lionel say if he thought you were going to be a Woman with a Mission? Good-night, dear, and don't worry about the Maoris. Many of them are real Christians nowadays, and nearly all the ...
— Rodman The Boatsteerer And Other Stories - 1898 • Louis Becke
... asked by Count Tolstoy, the aide-de-camp, and also by Treloar, if I would see the General, and accordingly did so, boarding a caique at Galata, and being rowed to his yacht "Luculle." First I saw the Baroness Wrangel, a bright, bird-like lady, trim and neat and cheerful, speaking English like one of ...
— Europe—Whither Bound? - Being Letters of Travel from the Capitals of Europe in the Year 1921 • Stephen Graham
... Hyde nor the Irish music edited by Moore could have survived. I do not mean to suggest that any art can be kept alive without the aid of such specialists as the poet, the singer, and the musician; but neither can it be kept healthily alive without the popular audience. Tolstoy's use of the unspoiled peasant as the test of art may lead to absurdities, if carried too far. But at least it is an error in the right direction. It is an affirmation of the fact that every man is potentially an artist just as Christianity is an affirmation ...
— The Art of Letters • Robert Lynd
... general case pled against Shakespear as an enemy of democracy by Tolstoy, the late Ernest Crosbie and others, and endorsed by Mr Harris. Will it really stand fire? Mr Harris emphasizes the passages in which Shakespear spoke of mechanics and even of small master tradesmen as base persons whose clothes were greasy, whose breath was rank, and whose ...
— Dark Lady of the Sonnets • George Bernard Shaw
... roam the Republic of Letters, we meet no citizen without a badge of consecrated service. Pretenders, perhaps, usurpers of the titles of others, men to whom literature is nothing but merchandise. These may be totally free from the impulse. Tolstoy, Ibsen, Hauptmann, Hugo are reformers of the first order, whose words are charged with revolt. The transcendentalism of Emerson, the naturalism of Zola, the cynicism of La Rochefoucauld are all convergent streams in the torrent of reforming words ...
— Mountain Meditations - and some subjects of the day and the war • L. Lind-af-Hageby
... which the majority of human beings are languishing, it is a mean low thing to do to travel first class. Read Dostoievsky, read Tolstoy, read Kropotkin! We are being chased like animals. We are being persecuted. It doesn't matter ...
— Atlantis • Gerhart Hauptmann
... critic of to-day is saying the same thing, only he uses two volumes instead of two lines to say it. It is true an occasional voice, like that of Tolstoy's, will be heard in protest, but the protest and the critic are both likely to be forgotten before the consensus of three centuries shall be ...
— Stories of Authors, British and American • Edwin Watts Chubb
... swallows," and "The others laugh at NASH'S expense,"—are well worth all the money that the spirited purchaser may have paid for this almost priceless work. In the same Magazine, the coloured frontispiece of "Count Tolstoy at Home," showing the Count, not labouring in the fields of literature, but simply guiding the plough, is as good as the article on the Kreutzer Sonata is interesting; and interesting also is the ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 98, April 5, 1890 • Various
... Tolstoy is right in his assertion that human progress is a march of ideas—and that the day of revolution by bloodshed has passed. He began to fear that his struggle with Bivens in his long-drawn and fiercely contested lawsuit was an act of the same essential quality of ...
— The Root of Evil • Thomas Dixon
... the middle of the drawing-room and recites "The Magdalen" by Tolstoy. He is listened to, but he has only delivered a few lines when a waltz is heard from the front room, and the recitation is stopped. Everybody dances. TROFIMOV, ANYA, VARYA, and LUBOV ANDREYEVNA come in from the ...
— Plays by Chekhov, Second Series • Anton Chekhov
... which lent their beauty to the charming up and down hill walks, now a public pleasaunce, but formerly the groves and gardens of the royal palace. Our talk in Spanish from him and Italian from me was of Tolstoy and several esthetic and spiritual interests, and when we remounted and drove back to the city, whom should I see, hard by the King's palace, but those dear Chilians of my heart whom we had left at Valladolid—husband, ...
— Familiar Spanish Travels • W. D. Howells
... conflict with the morality which makes domestic felicity its end. And again—as we see in the anti-militarist movement in France, in the history of the early Christian Church, in the case of the Quakers and in the teachings of Tolstoy—it may quite well set itself in conflict with national ideals, and dictate a line of conduct which is, from the point of ...
— The Unexpurgated Case Against Woman Suffrage • Almroth E. Wright
... some Tolstoy tries to practise literally the law of love and non-resistance with results that are distressing to his family and friends, and that are of doubtful value to the community. We may be sure the nations of the world will never practise this beautiful law of love until ...
— The Conquest of America - A Romance of Disaster and Victory • Cleveland Moffett
... not doing it at all. Ahimsa does not displace the practice of other virtues, but renders their practice imperatively necessary before it can be practised even in its rudiments. Mahavira and Buddha were soldiers, and so was Tolstoy. Only they saw deeper and truer into their profession, and found the secret of a true, happy, honourable and godly life. Let us be joint sharers with these teachers, and this land of ours will once more be the abode ...
— Third class in Indian railways • Mahatma Gandhi
... house for your wife is ready. Princess Mary will take her there and show her over, and they'll talk nineteen to the dozen. That's their woman's way! I am glad to have her. Sit down and talk. About Mikhelson's army I understand—Tolstoy's too... a simultaneous expedition.... But what's the southern army to do? Prussia is neutral... I know that. What about Austria?" said he, rising from his chair and pacing up and down the room followed by Tikhon, who ran after him, handing him different ...
— War and Peace • Leo Tolstoy
... America is, in truth, perhaps intellectually more remote from Europe than in its earlier days. The contact of its romanticism with that of Europe was, as has been seen, imperfect, but its touch with the later developments and reactions of the movement in Europe is far more imperfect. With Tolstoy, Ibsen, d'Annunzio, Zola, Nietzsche, Maeterlinck, Sudermann, the American people can have no effectual touch; their social tradition and culture make them impenetrable to the present ideas of Europe as they are current in literary forms. Nor has anything ...
— Project Gutenberg Encyclopedia
... Their country acted as a sink of energy like the Caspian Sea, and its surface kept the uniformity of ice and snow. One Russian peasant kissing an ikon on a saint's day, in the Kremlin, served for a hundred million. The student had no need to study Wallace, or re-read Tolstoy or Tourguenieff or Dostoiewski to refresh his memory of the most poignant analysis of human inertia ever put in words; Gorky was more than ...
— The Education of Henry Adams • Henry Adams
... the great Russian dramatist of the central decades of the nineteenth century, of the years when the realistic school was all-powerful in Russian literature, of the period when Turgenev, Dostoyevsky, and Tolstoy created a literature of prose fiction that has had no superior in the world's history. His work in the drama takes its place beside theirs in the novel. Obviously inferior as it is in certain ways, it yet sheds light on an important side of Russian ...
— Plays • Alexander Ostrovsky
... compare, Which from the devil's bookcase start, Albums magnificent which scare The fashionable rhymester's heart! Yea! although rendered beauteous By Tolstoy's pencil marvellous, Though Baratynski verses penned,(45) The thunderbolt on you descend! Whene'er a brilliant courtly dame Presents her quarto amiably, Despair and anger seize on me, And a malicious epigram Trembles upon my lips from ...
— Eugene Oneguine [Onegin] - A Romance of Russian Life in Verse • Aleksandr Sergeevich Pushkin
... example, the reader will find a most penetrating analysis of the dense stupidity which so often accompanies man's love of bloodshed. The sketch of the second lieutenant, who was for "murdering the negroes to make them tell," when he could not make them even understand what he wanted, is worthy of Tolstoy. We have not space here to dwell upon the scores of passages of similar deep insight which make "Captain Singleton" a most true and vivid commentary on the life of Defoe's times, but we may call special attention ...
— The Life, Adventures & Piracies of the Famous Captain Singleton • Daniel Defoe
... musicians and lovers of humanity. The world has known the tyrants like Plehve, Trepoff, Orloff and Stolypin, or others like Rasputin, Protopopoff and forgets that Russia has also produced geniuses like Dostoyewsky, Turgenieff, Tchaikowsky, Tolstoy, Moussorgsky, Rimsky-Korsakoff, Mendeleyeff and Metchnikoff. The world has looked at Russia as a land of uncultivated steppes, of frozen ground, hungry bears and desperate Cossacks, and forgets that in actuality this is the Russia of the past very extreme ...
— Defenders of Democracy • Militia of Mercy
... to dictate their own terms of durance. The criminal code, whose dignity generations of male rebels could not impair, the whole array of warders, lawyers, judges, juries, and policemen, which all the scorn of a Tolstoy could not shrivel, shrank into a laughing-stock. And the comedy of the situation was complicated and enhanced by the fact that the Home Office, so far from being an Inquisition, was more or less tenanted by sympathizers with Female Suffrage, and that a Home Secretary who secretly admired ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Vol. 21 - The Recent Days (1910-1914) • Charles F. Horne, Editor
... literature was thoroughly established, and all the young writers of the succeeding epoch, that of the '50's, gathered around him. Grigorovitch, Turgeneff, Gontcharoff, Nekrasoff, Apollon Maikoff, Dostoevsky, Tolstoy, and the rest, may be said to have been reared on Byelinsky's criticism, inspired by it to creative activity, and indebted to it for much of their fame. Byelinsky, moreover, educated the minds of that whole generation, and ...
— A Survey of Russian Literature, with Selections • Isabel Florence Hapgood
... parties as long as each believes itself to be in the right and sees no ground for waiving its opinion? To begin with, clearly the State does well to avoid such conflicts by substituting alternatives. Other duties than that of military service may be found for a follower of Tolstoy, and as long as he is willing to take his full share of burdens the difficulty is fairly met. Again, the mere convenience of the majority cannot be fairly weighed against the religious convictions of the few. It might be convenient that certain public work should be done on Saturday, but ...
— Liberalism • L. T. Hobhouse
... directions named, but he was not without talents. He could wash and wipe dishes and, incredible as it may seem, he was also literary. Like attracts like, by some law past understanding. To me it still seems a wonderful thing that this little waif of a man with a taste for Tolstoy and a passion for long words should have just then ...
— Dwellers in Arcady - The Story of an Abandoned Farm • Albert Bigelow Paine
... Blake as superficially as the XVIII had ignored Hogarth or the XVII Bunyan, had got past the Dickens-Macaulay Dumas-Guizot stage and the Stendhal-Meredith-Turgenieff stage, and were confronted with philosophic fiction by such pens as Ibsen's and Tolstoy's, Don Juan had changed his sex and become Dona Juana, breaking out of the Doll's House and asserting herself as an individual instead of a mere item in ...
— Man And Superman • George Bernard Shaw
... contained the following: "You will get the enclosed article inserted in the Correspondent without suffering a single word to be altered. Should the censor refuse, you must apply to the directing Burgomaster, and, in case of his refusal, to General Tolstoy, who will devise some means of rendering the Senate more complying, and forcing it to ...
— The Memoirs of Napoleon Bonaparte • Bourrienne, Constant, and Stewarton
... not wax rich. "One thing thou lackest, O Walt Whitman!" we might have said to the poet; "you are not a financier." He died poor. But this is no proof of degeneracy, save on 'Change. When the children of Count Tolstoy endeavored to have him adjudged insane, the Court denied the application and voiced the wisest decision that ever came out of Russia: A man who gives away his money is not necessarily more foolish ...
— Little Journeys to the Homes of the Great, Vol. 1 of 14 - Little Journeys to the Homes of Good Men and Great • Elbert Hubbard |
