"Tolstoy" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... order, indeed, is almost as arbitrary as alphabetical order. To deal with Darwin, Dickens, Browning, in the sequence of the birthday book would be to forge about as real a chain as the "Tacitus, Tolstoy, Tupper" of a biographical dictionary. It might lend itself more, perhaps, to accuracy: and it might satisfy that school of critics who hold that every artist should be treated as a solitary craftsman, indifferent to the commonwealth and ...
— The Victorian Age in Literature • G. K. Chesterton
... descriptions, he comforts us with a consolation, an ideal, a "little fire" that burns in the distance and attracts us. But to get to that fire we have to fight against evil. And it is perhaps in answer to Tolstoy's doctrine of passive resistance that Korolenko wrote that beautiful story called, "The Legend of Florus," the subject of which was probably taken from "The War of the Jews," by ...
— Contemporary Russian Novelists • Serge Persky
... weeks before his passing, some one told him this little story of Tolstoy's: A priest, seeing a peasant plowing, approached him and said, "If you knew you were to die tonight, how would you spend the ...
— Little Journeys to the Homes of the Great, Volume 11 (of 14) - Little Journeys to the Homes of Great Businessmen • Elbert Hubbard
... Long and to his publisher. Tchehkoff's stories are really remarkable. If any one of authority stated that they rank him with the fixed stars of Russian fiction—Dostoievsky, Tourgeniev, Gogol, and Tolstoy—I should not be ready to contradict. To read them, after even the finest stories of de Maupassant or Murray Gilchrist, is like having a bath after a ball. Their effect is extraordinarily one of ingenuousness. ...
— Books and Persons - Being Comments on a Past Epoch 1908-1911 • Arnold Bennett
... and went to look for it, I saw only some pretty rills and falls which it possibly fed and 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, wife, sister, ...
— Familiar Spanish Travels • W. D. Howells
... quarrel with the world, and he did 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 than he who ...
— Little Journeys to the Homes of the Great, Vol. 1 of 14 - Little Journeys to the Homes of Good Men and Great • Elbert Hubbard
... 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 novelist's statement, but it may well be true. History relates that in the Jena campaign ...
— 1914 • John French, Viscount of Ypres
... Answer. I have read Tolstoy. He is a curious mixture of simplicity and philosophy. He seems to have been carried away by his conception of religion. He is a non-resistant to such a degree that he asserts that he would not, if attacked, use violence to preserve his own life or the life ...
— The Works of Robert G. Ingersoll, Volume VIII. - Interviews • Robert Green Ingersoll
... 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 ...
— Recent Developments in European Thought • Various
... Huss, Wyclif, Latimer and Tyndale used for kindling—all this in the name of religion, institutional religion, the one thing that has caused more misery, heartaches, bloodshed, war, than all other causes combined. Leo Tolstoy says, "Love, truth, compassion, service, sympathy, tenderness, exist in the hearts of men, and are the essence of religion, but try to encompass these things in an institution and you get a church—and the Church stands for and has always stood for ...
— Little Journeys to the Homes of the Great, Volume 9 - Subtitle: Little Journeys to the Homes of Great Reformers • Elbert Hubbard
... printed below is a translation of Tolstoy's letter written in Russian in reply to one from the Editor of Free Hindustan. After having passed from hand to hand, this letter at last came into my possession through a friend who asked me, as one much interested ...
— A Letter to a Hindu • Leo Tolstoy
... how could it possibly be otherwise? Was not this the way of all the world? Let a little prosperity come to a poor peasant, and the first thing he did was to stop eating five from the same bowl. That was Tolstoy; and that was the way, through all peoples and all times, riches had meant segregation from the Common.... Round and round them pulsed the great warm tide of real life, and, stung by this mad blindness, men sweated and fought their ...
— V. V.'s Eyes • Henry Sydnor Harrison
... addition to their company had made severe inroads on their larder and it was not long before they were all reduced to unleavened bread made with muddy water. The days were utterly tedious, and were made only slightly more bearable for Roosevelt by Tolstoy's "Anna Karenina" and Matthew Arnold, interlarded with "The History of the James Brothers," which the thieves quite properly carried among their belongings. And the thieves had to be watched every minute, and the wind blew and ...
— Roosevelt in the Bad Lands • Hermann Hagedorn
... 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 ...
— Strictly Business • O. Henry
... as to enable him to paint, as it were, with a free hand exactly as he saw; and most certainly not that he saw only the visible world. The mystical element is not directly favourable to creative art. You see in Tolstoy how it arrests and perplexes—how it lays a disturbing check on real presentation—hindering the action, and is not favourable to the loving and faithful representation, which, as Goethe said, all true and high art should ...
— Robert Louis Stevenson - a Record, an Estimate, and a Memorial • Alexander H. Japp
... fair, Britten, though naturally, we know nothing. But they do say that poor Lord Crossborough has gone quite silly about the rural life. He's been reading Tolstoy's books, and wants to live upon a shilling a day; while poor Lady Crossborough, who knows my cousin, Captain Blackham, very well, she's bored to death, and it will kill her if it goes on. So, you see, she persuaded his lordship to give that funny party at his old house in Portman Square last ...
— The Man Who Drove the Car • Max Pemberton
... and grasping his by the hand. "The 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 articles ...
— War and Peace • Leo Tolstoy
... first 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
... walls. Grief fell to running over their titles. A fairly well-read man himself, for a sea-adventurer, he glimpsed a wide-ness of range and catholicity of taste that were beyond him. Old friends he met, and others that he had heard of but never read. There were complete sets of Tolstoy, Turgenieff, and Gorky; of Cooper and Mark Twain; of Hugo, and Zola, and Sue; and of Flaubert, De Maupassant, and Paul de Koch. He glanced curiously at the pages of Metchnikoff, Weininger, and Schopenhauer, and wonderingly at those ...
— A Son Of The Sun • Jack London
... purchased his freedom and the freedom of his family for 3,500 roubles, being at the rate of 700 roubles a soul, with one daughter, Alexandra, thrown in for nothing. The grandson of this serf was Anton Chekhov, the author; the son of the nobleman was Tchertkov, the Tolstoyan and friend of Tolstoy. ...
— Letters of Anton Chekhov • Anton Chekhov
... diplomatists and the very few amateurs whose hobby is foreign policy even knew that the guns were loaded. A Russian playwright, Tchekov, had produced four fascinating dramatic studies of Heartbreak House, of which three, The Cherry Orchard, Uncle Vanya, and The Seagull, had been performed in England. Tolstoy, in his Fruits of Enlightenment, had shown us through it in his most ferociously contemptuous manner. Tolstoy did not waste any sympathy on it: it was to him the house in which Europe was stifling ...
— Heartbreak House • George Bernard Shaw
... "Yes, Tolstoy," the unreal editor retorted. "He more than any other has brought us back to the knowledge of this truth which came into the world with Christmas, perhaps because he, more than any other, has tried ...
— Imaginary Interviews • W. D. Howells
... 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 ...
— A Short History of England • G. K. Chesterton
... her, she showed herself, so I was told, a most agreeable woman. Thus forewarned as to her ways, I found that such was the fact. I gave for her benefit a little luncheon party at the Bachelors' Club, the only guests whom I asked to meet her being Philip Stanhope and Countess Tolstoy (now Lord and Lady Weardale), Lord and Lady Blythswood, and Julia, Lady Jersey. Ouida arrived trimmed with the most exuberant furs, which, when they were removed, revealed a costume of primrose color—a costume so artfully cut that, the moment she sat down, ...
— Memoirs of Life and Literature • W. H. Mallock
... stands in 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 ...
— Plays by Chekhov, Second Series • Anton Chekhov
... believe themselves the centre of the cause. For such to start a new belief is a biological necessity, and should by no means be discouraged. It is a safety-valve—the form of passion which the fires of youth take in men after the age of fifty, as one may judge by the case of the prophet Tolstoy and other great ones. But to resume: In the centre, of course, are situated the enormous majority of the community, whose view is that they have no view of ...
— Another Sheaf • John Galsworthy
... Tertullian Origen Chrysostom St. Francis d'Assisi Cornaro Leonardo da Vinci Milton Locke Spinoza Voltaire Pope Gassendi Swedenborg Thackeray Linnaeus Shelley Lamartine Michelet William Lambe Sir Isaac Pitman Thoreau Fitzgerald Herbert Burrows Garibaldi Wagner Edison Tesla Marconi Tolstoy George Frederick Watts Maeterlinck Vivekananda General Booth Mrs. Besant Bernard Shaw Rev. Prof. John E. B. Mayor Hon. E. Lyttelton Rev. R. J. Campbell Lord Charles Beresford Gen. Sir Ed. Bulwer ...
— No Animal Food - and Nutrition and Diet with Vegetable Recipes • Rupert H. Wheldon
... years.[2] Not that Addison invents anything; but he catches every current whisper and swells it to the journalistic audibility. Here, if we take Addison at his word, are the key ideas for Wordsworth's Preface on the language of rustic life, for Tolstoy's ruthless reduction of taste to the peasant norm. Addison went on to urge what was perfectly just, that the old popular ballads ought to be read and liked; at the same time he pushed his praise to a rather wild extreme, and he made some comic comparisons between Chevy Chase ...
— Parodies of Ballad Criticism (1711-1787) • William Wagstaffe
... 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 to the passage on page 189 which describe the sale of the ...
— The Life, Adventures & Piracies of the Famous Captain Singleton • Daniel Defoe
... years old. He was born on January 29, 1866, at Clamecy (Nievre), France. He came very early under the influence of Tolstoy and Wagner and displayed a remarkable critical faculty. In 1895 (at the age of twenty-nine) we find him awarded the coveted Grand Prix of the Academie Francaise for his work Histoire de l'Opera en Europe avant Lulli et ...
— Musicians of To-Day • Romain Rolland
... and sells at fixed low prices that may not be raised by retailers, the works of Koltzov, Nikitin, Krylov, Saltykov-Shtchedrin, Chekhov, Goncharov, Uspensky, Tchernyshevsky, Pomyalovsky and others. It is issuing Chukovsky's edition of Nekrasov, reprints of Tolstoy, Dostoievsky and Turgenev, and books by Professor Timiriazev, Karl Pearson and others of a scientific character, besides the complete works of Lenin's old rival, Plekhanov. It is true that most of this work is simply done by reprinting ...
— Russia in 1919 • Arthur Ransome
... 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 women can ...
— Rodman The Boatsteerer And Other Stories - 1898 • Louis Becke
... this of the Anarchism that is opposed to contemporary Socialism, the political Anarchism. But there is also another sort of Anarchism, which the student of these schools of thought must keep clear in his mind from this, the Anarchism of Tolstoy and that other brand of William Morris, neither of which waves any flag of black, nor counsels violence; they present that conception of untrammelled and spontaneous rightness and goodness which is, indeed, I hazard, the moral ideal of all rightly-thinking men. It is worth while ...
— New Worlds For Old - A Plain Account of Modern Socialism • Herbert George Wells
... 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 of ...
— Desert Air - 1905 • Robert Hichens
... 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 ...
— Stories of Authors, British and American • Edwin Watts Chubb
... Goldoni, Manzoni, 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
... them 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 ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Vol. 21 - The Recent Days (1910-1914) • Charles F. Horne, Editor
... absolute integrity—since Tolstoy I know of no writing so crystal clear—"Jean-Christophe" is the first great book of the twentieth century. In a sense it begins the twentieth century. It bridges transition, and shows us where we stand. It reveals the past and ...
— Jean-Christophe, Vol. I • Romain Rolland
... conversation with Sadako; but there was an interchange of letters almost every day, long subjective letters describing states of mind and high ideals, punctuated with shadowy Japanese poems and with quotations from the Bible, Tolstoy, Nietzsche, Bergson, Eucken, Oscar Wilde ...
— Kimono • John Paris
... been unusually parsimonious in only sending me a single copy of the Ballade of Count Tolstoy. ["The Blind Bard." Liszt wrote the melodramatic piano accompaniment to it (1874).] Allow me then to make use of this copy to indicate the version which I think should be put into the arrangement for piano (alone without declamation). I add, the necessary notes and ...
— Letters of Franz Liszt, Volume 2: "From Rome to the End" • Franz Liszt; letters collected by La Mara and translated
... French, which, among other things, 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 observe ...
— The Memoirs of Napoleon Bonaparte • Bourrienne, Constant, and Stewarton
... glorify the triumphs of the battlefield. The commentaries of the hero-worshiper to-day do not record the names of a Marlborough or a Bonaparte. Rather does the young man find his idols in the more humble annals of a Tolstoy or a Hay. And the new ideal of international peace is not merely the religion of a few enthusiasts. In an individual way these apostles of peace voice to the world the spirit of the unnumbered thousands of obscurer men whose lives ...
— Prize Orations of the Intercollegiate Peace Association • Intercollegiate Peace Association
... story 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 and ...
— Savva and The Life of Man • Leonid Andreyev
... issued by arrangement with V. Tchertkoff, sole literary representative of Leo Tolstoy outside Russia, and Editor of "The Free Age ...
— Tolstoy on Shakespeare - A Critical Essay on Shakespeare • Leo Tolstoy |
