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Leo Tolstoy - From the Appreciation category:
The appreciation of the merits of art - of the emotions it conveys - depends upon an understanding of the meaning of life... (Leo Tolstoy)
Leo Tolstoy - From the Art category:
Art is not a pleasure, a solace, or an amusement; art is great matter. (Leo Tolstoy)
Leo Tolstoy - From the Artists category:
Art is a microscope which the artist fixes on the secrets of his soul, and shows to people these secrets which are common to all. (Leo Tolstoy)
Leo Tolstoy - From the Authority category:
Through the influence of real art, aided by science, guided by religion... peaceful co-operation of man is now obtained by external means – by law courts, police, charitable institutions, factory inspections... It should be obtained by man's free and joyous activity. (Leo Tolstoy)
Leo Tolstoy - From the Awareness category:
In the name of God, stop a moment, cease your work, look around you. (Leo Tolstoy)
Leo Tolstoy - From the Beauty category:
It is amazing how complete is the delusion that beauty is goodness. (Leo Tolstoy)
Leo Tolstoy - From the Books category:
- What is Art?, 1896...
In spite the mountains of books written about art, no precise definition of art has been constructed. And the reason for this is that the conception of art has been based on the conception of beauty. (Leo Tolstoy)
Leo Tolstoy - From the Boredom category:
Boredom: the desire for desires. (Leo Tolstoy)
Leo Tolstoy - From the Brother/Sisterhood category:
In our age the common religious perception of men is the consciousness of the brotherhood of man – we know that the well-being of man lies in the union with his fellow men. True science should indicate the various methods of applying this consciousness to life. Art should transform this perception into feeling. (Leo Tolstoy)
Leo Tolstoy - From the Change category:
True life is lived when tiny changes occur. (Leo Tolstoy)
Leo Tolstoy - From the Change category:
The changes in our life must come from the impossibility to live otherwise than according to the demands of our conscience, not from our mental resolution to try a new form of life. (Leo Tolstoy)
Leo Tolstoy - From the Communication category:
Art is a human activity having for its purpose the transmission to others of the highest and the best feelings to which men have risen. (Leo Tolstoy)
Leo Tolstoy - From the Communication category:
By words one transmits thoughts to another; by means of art, one transmits feelings. (Leo Tolstoy)
Leo Tolstoy - From the Creativity category:
The idea of beauty is the fundamental idea of everything. In the world we see only distortions of the fundamental idea, but art, by imagination, may lift itself to the height of this idea. Art is therefore akin to creation. (Leo Tolstoy)
Leo Tolstoy - From the Danger category:
At the approach of danger two voices speak with equal force in the heart of man: one very reasonably tells the man to consider the nature of the danger and the means of avoiding it and the other, even more reasonable, says that it is too painful and harassing to think of the danger... better to turn aside from the painful subject till it has come, and to think of what is pleasant. In solitude a man generally yields to the first voice; in society to the second. (Leo Tolstoy)
Leo Tolstoy - From the Desperation category:
- A Confession...
Can it be that I have overlooked something, that there is something which I have failed to understand? Is it not possible that this state of despair is common to everyone? (Leo Tolstoy)
Leo Tolstoy - From the Discovery category:
I have discovered nothing new; I have only perceived what I already knew. (Leo Tolstoy)
Leo Tolstoy - From the Earth category:
The earth is the general and equal possession of all humanity and therefore cannot be the property of individuals. (Leo Tolstoy)
Leo Tolstoy - From the Ego category:
A man is like a fraction whose numerator is what he is and whose denominator is what he thinks of himself. The larger the denominator the smaller the fraction. (Leo Tolstoy)
Leo Tolstoy - From the Ego category:
A man is like a fraction whose numerator is what he is and whose denominator is what he thinks of himself. The larger the denominator, the smaller the fraction. (Leo Tolstoy)
Leo Tolstoy - From the Emotion category:
Art is a human activity consisting in this, that one man consciously by means of certain signs, hands on to others feelings he has lived through, and that others are infected by those feelings and experience them. (Leo Tolstoy)
Leo Tolstoy - From the Expression category:
To evoke in oneself a feeling one has once experienced, and having evoked it in oneself, then by means of movements, lines, colors, sounds, or forms expressed through words, so to convey this so that others may experience the same feeling - this is the activity of art. (Leo Tolstoy)
Leo Tolstoy - From the Faith category:
Faith is the sense of life, that sense by virtue of which man does not destroy himself, but continues to live on. It is the force whereby we live. (Leo Tolstoy)
Leo Tolstoy - From the Fashion category:
He never chooses an opinion; he just wears whatever happens to be in style. (Leo Tolstoy)
Leo Tolstoy - From the Gender category:
What counts in making a happy marriage is not so much how compatible you are but how you deal with incompatibility. (Leo Tolstoy)
Leo Tolstoy - From the Gender category:
Woman, you see, is an object of such a kind that study it as much as you will, it is always quite new. (Leo Tolstoy)
Leo Tolstoy - From the Greatness category:
There is no greatness where there is not simplicity, goodness and truth. (Leo Tolstoy)
Leo Tolstoy - From the Greatness category:
Great works of art are only great because they are accessible and comprehensible to everyone. (Leo Tolstoy)
Leo Tolstoy - From the Happiness category:
One of the first conditions of happiness is that the link between Man and Nature shall not be broken. (Leo Tolstoy)
Leo Tolstoy - From the Happiness category:
Happiness does not depend on outward things, but on the way we see them. (Leo Tolstoy)
Leo Tolstoy - From the Health category:
Our body is a machine for living. It is organized for that, it is its nature. Let life go on in it unhindered and let it defend itself – it will do more than if you paralyze it by encumbering it with remedies. (Leo Tolstoy)
Leo Tolstoy - From the Humanity category:
The sole meaning of life is to serve humanity. (Leo Tolstoy)
Leo Tolstoy - From the Hypocrisy category:
Hypocrisy in anything whatever may deceive the cleverest and most penetrating man, but the least wide-awake of children recognizes it, and is revolted by it, however ingeniously it may be disguised. (Leo Tolstoy)
Leo Tolstoy - From the Importance category:
-What is Art?, 1896...
The activity of art is... as important as the activity of language itself, and as universal. (Leo Tolstoy)
Leo Tolstoy - From the Intellect category:
The more we live by our intellect, the less we understand the meaning of life. (Leo Tolstoy)
Leo Tolstoy - From the Knowledge category:
When ignorance does not know something, it says that what it does not know is stupid. (Leo Tolstoy)
Leo Tolstoy - From the Knowledge category:
Art is the uniting of the subjective with the objective, of nature with reason, of the unconscious with the conscious, and therefore art is the highest means of knowledge. (Leo Tolstoy)
Leo Tolstoy - From the Love category:
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)
Leo Tolstoy - From the Love category:
If it is true that there are as many minds as there are heads, then there are as many kinds of love as there are hearts. (Leo Tolstoy)
Leo Tolstoy - From the Music category:
Music is the shorthand of emotion. (Leo Tolstoy)
Leo Tolstoy - From the Originality category:
Real art, like the wife of an affectionate husband, needs no ornaments. But counterfeit art, like a prostitute, must always be decked out. The cause of production of real art is the artist's inner need to express a feeling that has accumulated...The cause of counterfeit art, as of prostitution, is gain. The consequence of true art is the introduction of a new feeling into the intercourse of life... The consequences of counterfeit art are the perversion of man, pleasure which never satisfies, and the weakening of man's spiritual strength. (Leo Tolstoy)
Leo Tolstoy - From the Patience category:
Everything comes in time to him who knows how to wait. (Leo Tolstoy)
Leo Tolstoy - From the Patriotism category:
-in a letter to a Polish journalist, Sept. 1895...
By patriotism is meant, not only spontaneous, instinctive love for one's own nation, and preference for it above all other nations, but also the belief that such love and preference are good and useful. (Leo Tolstoy)
Leo Tolstoy - From the Peace category:
The task of art is enormous... Art should cause violence to be set aside. And it is only art that can accomplish this. (Leo Tolstoy)
Leo Tolstoy - From the Perfection category:
If you look for perfection, you'll never be content. (Leo Tolstoy)
Leo Tolstoy - From the Pleasure category:
People understand the meaning of eating lies in the nourishment of the body only when they cease to consider that the object of that activity is pleasure... People understand the meaning of art only when they cease to consider that the aim of that activity is beauty, i.e., pleasure. (Leo Tolstoy)
Leo Tolstoy - From the Prayer category:
My reason will still not understand why I pray, but I shall still pray, and my life, my whole life, independently of anything that may happen to me, is every moment of it no longer meaningless as it was before... (Leo Tolstoy)
Leo Tolstoy - From the Progress category:
Progress consists only in the greater clarification of answers to the basic questions of life. (Leo Tolstoy)
Leo Tolstoy - From the Questions category:
Historians are like deaf people who go on answering questions that no one has asked them. (Leo Tolstoy)
Leo Tolstoy - From the Reality category:
Seize the moments of happiness; love and be loved! That is the only reality in the world; all else is folly. (Leo Tolstoy)
Leo Tolstoy - From the Religion category:
Religions are the exponents of the highest comprehension of life... within a given age in a given society... a basis for evaluating human sentiments. If feelings bring people nearer to the religion's ideal... they are good; if these estrange them from it, and oppose it, they are bad. (Leo Tolstoy)
Leo Tolstoy - From the Rewards category:
You see, if you take pains and learn in order to get a reward, the work will seem hard; but when you work... if you love your work, you will find your reward in that. (Leo Tolstoy)
Leo Tolstoy - From the Sadness category:
Pure and complete sorrow is as impossible as pure and complete joy. (Leo Tolstoy)
Leo Tolstoy - From the Searching category:
Rummaging in our souls, we often dig up something that ought to have lain there unnoticed. (Leo Tolstoy)
Leo Tolstoy - From the Thinking category:
Freethinkers are those who are willing to use their minds without prejudice and without fearing to understand things that clash with their own customs, privileges, or beliefs. This state of mind is not common, but it is essential for right thinking. (Leo Tolstoy)
Leo Tolstoy - From the Truth category:
Most men, including those at ease with problems of the greatest complexity, can seldom accept even the simplest and most obvious truth if it be such as would oblige them to admit the falsity of conclusions in which they have delighted... (Leo Tolstoy)
Leo Tolstoy - From the Truth category:
Truth, like gold, is to be obtained not by its growth, but by washing away from it all that is not gold. (Leo Tolstoy)
Leo Tolstoy - From the Understanding category:
To say that a work of art is good, but incomprehensible to the majority of men, is the same as saying of some kind of food that it is very good but that most people can't eat it. (Leo Tolstoy)
Leo Tolstoy - From the Understanding category:
Humanity unceasingly strives forward from a lower, more partial and obscure understanding of life to one more general and more lucid. (Leo Tolstoy)
Leo Tolstoy - From the Universe category:
Art lifts man from his personal life into the universal life. (Leo Tolstoy)
Leo Tolstoy - From the Wisdom category:
We can know only that we know nothing. And that is the highest degree of human wisdom. (Leo Tolstoy)
Leo Tolstoy - From the Words category:
The chief difference between words and deeds is that words are always intended for men for their approbation, but deeds can be done only for God. (Leo Tolstoy)
Leo Tolstoy - From the Writing category:
A writer is dear and necessary for us only in the measure of which he reveals to us the inner workings of his very soul. (Leo Tolstoy)
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