Top 184 Lev Tolstoy Quotes & Sayings

As a rule of thumb I say, if Socrates, Jesus and Tolstoy wouldn't do it, don't.

You should never apologize for existing, Lev. Not even to all those people out there who wish you didn't.

I'm through with Tolstoy. He has ceased to exist for me.... If I eat a bowl of soup and like it, I know by that fact alone and with absolute certainty that Tolstoy will find it bad, and vice versa.

I'm not going to get into the ring with Tolstoy.

Yes, there is some thought about making a film of My Name Is Asher Lev.

While my stories are experimental, they're also very traditional. I love the works of the great Russian writers like [Pavel] Chekhov and [Lev] Tolstoy, and their ability to portray our human struggles and joys.

Affairs have been going on since Tolstoy.

I started with [Leo] Tolstoy and I was overwhelmed. Tolstoy writes like an ocean, in huge, rolling waves, and it doesn't look like it was processed through his thinking. It feels very natural. You don't question whether Tolstoy's right or wrong. His philosophy is housed in interrelating characters, so it's not up for grabs.

Proust was the greatest novelist of the twentieth century, just as Tolstoy was in the nineteenth.

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

I started reading and fell in love with the worlds and characters Lev Grossman created. I'm taken with his exploration of an idealized childhood fantasy through the lens of adulthood, or coming into adulthood.

In high school I read [Lev] Tolstoy's "Anna Karenina" and loved it. Then I read [Friedrich] Nietzsche's "On the Genealogy of Morals" and that hit me hard. I don't know where I got it. My parents warned me not to mention either of those books when I went for my college interviews so I wouldn't seem like an egghead. They told me to talk about sports.

To think of Tolstoy eating a sandwich is intrinsically kind of funny.

When you started looking at the life of Tolstoy, there was so much passion and anger and drama surrounding him.

My intention is always to honor the character that Lev [Grossman] created in the books and my greatest concern, honestly, is that the fans of the books will embrace me as this character that they've imagined in their heads.

Lev smiles. "Leave it to you to turn someone else's screwup into gold

Tolstoy was the greatest apostle of nonviolence that the present age has produced.

... good teachers, like Tolstoy's happy families, are alike everywhere.

In 'A Confession,' Tolstoy found meaning that he could hold on to, and he lived for another 30 years.

Take Jonathan Franzen's work: it's just old wine in new bottles. They say he's the Tolstoy of the digital age, but there can only be a Tolstoy of the Tolstoyan age.

… the world will indulge you just so long Asher Lev. Then it will stop. You will simply have to grow accustomed to that truth.

I get the same buzz cleaning up the yard as Leo Tolstoy did from scything hay.

I'm happy to have interns at The Weekly Standard and happy to have readers of The Weekly Standard, but if you all tell me that you were busy reading Plato and [Lev] Tolstoy and playing violin in the orchestra, I'd say that was great. I wouldn't tell you to take time out from that to get involved in political journalism.

So," says Lev, as casually as he can, "you wanna dance?" "Do you believe in the end of the world?" she responds. Lev shrugs. "I don't know. Why?" "Because the day after that is when I'll dance with you.

We were talking about television one time, and Damon Lindelof said he felt that, if Ernst Hemingway was writing for media, he would write feature films, and Lev Tolstoy and Fedor Dostoyevsky would write television series because there are some stories you just can't tell in two hours.

I think that maybe happy families don't need stories the way unhappy families need stories. Maybe they're too busy living that they don't actually step back and talk about life like the Anton Chekhov quote. I prefer Anton Chekhov to Lev Tolstoy, and the reason is because of what he leaves out. Sometimes I think Tolstoy had a theory that he was proving and he proved it. Chekhov is more ambiguous.

What Tolstoy is on about is that carnal love is not a good idea.

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.

...smoking is just a habit. 'Tolstoy', she said, mentioning someone I hadn't met, 'says that just as much pleasure can be got from twirling the fingers'. My impulse was to tell her Tolstoy was off his onion, but I choked down the heated words. For all I know, the man might be a bosom pal of hers and she might resent criticism of him, however justified.

Vermeer's woman reading a letter is as full of latent or subliminal kitsch as Tolstoy's War and Peace.

Tranq'd by your own gun,"Lev says."How pathetic.

I soon abandoned the question of who Kurban Said or Essad Bey was for the more problematic one - who was Lev Nussimbaum?

I think Tolstoy had an unbelievably complicated relationship with women.

I like the hip writers: Fitzgerald, the guy who committed suicide, Hemingway, all those guys. Some of them were alcoholics and drug addicts but they had fun. They were real people. They formed the culture of American literature. Hemingway admired Tolstoy, Tolstoy admired Pushkin, and Mailer admired Hemingway. It all flows down. The greats are all connected. One day I'm gonna write a book myself. The first chapter will be about what a rough deal my momma got. She believed in you guys and your society.

There have only been two world-class goalkeepers. One was Lev Yashin, the other was the German boy who played for Manchester City.

Leo Tolstoy ... defines patriotism as the principle that will justify the training of wholesale murderers.

I was nothing more than a thug with Tolstoy in my pocket.

The pressure on language to deteriorate does not come merely from below, from the "democratic" lev-elers. It comes also from above, from the fancy jar-gonmongers, idle game players, fashionable coteries for second-rate intellectuals.

Leo Tolstoy said the purpose of art is to teach you to love life. And that's what I want.

Like Rick in Casablanca: "We'll always have Paris." When what we'll always have is, like, Brooklyn and arguments about [Lev] Trotsky.

I first read War And Peace about 100 years after Tolstoy wrote it.

I recognize limitations in the sense that I've read Tolstoy and Dostoyevsky and Shakespeare . . . Aside from that I don't think of limiting myself.

You don't often get a proposal to do Tolstoy for a really interesting director - that's easy to say yes to.

[Lev] Tolstoy is not a boy-writer. He's a grown-up. And [Fedor] Doestoeivski is not a boy-writer.

How many really great writers are there who are totally non-political? You can hear the French Revolution in the poetry of [Percy Bysshe] Shelly and [John] Wordsworth; you can sense the vast inequalities of Tsarist Russia in [Anton] Chekhov and [Lev] Tolstoy.

I would say it was [ifluence] all the Greeks and the Russian classics like [Lev] Tolstoy, [Andrey] Goncharov,[Fedor] Dostoyevsky, [Alexander] Pushkin, and the international classics in Russian translation like Victor Hugo, George Sand, Charlotte Bronte, Sir Walter Scott, Mark Twain.

I'm never going to be Tolstoy.

I think for Lev [Grossman], C. S. Lewis was a huge inspiration from his childhood. I know that Brideshead Revisited is a book that he's incredibly found of and he took certain structural influences from that book that he brought into The Magicians.

I survived many a youth hostel bunk room reading Tolstoy by flashlight.

A great thing is happening on cable TV. You see characters change in stories over years, like in Tolstoy. That's a whole, thrilling new form that I really enjoy. They are Tolstoy-an in their endless character development and narrative changes... a show like 'Breaking Bad' is astonishing.

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

It's like Tolstoy said. Happiness is an allegory, unhappiness a story.

It is possible to call Tolstoy Kitsch.

Lev Nussimbaum was born in October 1905, the moment when the tolerant, haute capitaliste culture of Baku began to fall apart.

If you need to talk about your childhood, you’re safe with me. If you need to break into a million pieces, I’m right here, Lev. I’ll find them all, I’m good at details, and I’ll put you back together. You’re safe here.

I agree with the Lev Tolstoy quote completely, but I also feel like there's more to it. What is a happy family and an unhappy family? We're probably both of those things at the same time.

Out of Dostoevsky: Kafka. Out of Tolstoy: Margaret Mitchell. (in conversation, explaining his dislike for Tolstoy)

This is not Tolstoy. I don't want to know what critics and professors think of what I'm writing. It might hurt my feelings.

I think if I were reading to a grandchild, I might read Tolstoy's War and Peace. They would learn about Russia, they would learn about history, they would learn about human nature. They would learn about, "Can the individual make a difference or is it great forces?" Tolstoy is always battling with those large issues. Mostly, a whole world would come alive for them through that book.

I used to have a great love for Dostoyevsky and Tolstoy, the big boys of the last century.