Quotes from Leo Tolstoy

I'm taking a class on Tolstoy this semester, and one of the assignments is to assemble a quotes log as we go through his works. Tolstoy's language is elegant and extremely potent, so I thought it would be a shame not to share them. Here are some of my favorite quotes from my current log.
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"A man is never such an egotist as at moments of spiritual ecstasy. At such times it seems to him that there is nothing more splendid and interesting than himself. " -The Cossacks (87)


"Ivan Ilych's life had been most simple, most ordinary, and most terrible."
-Death of Ivan Ilyich (255)


"That Caius - man in the abstract- was mortal, was perfectly correct, but he was not Caius, not an abstract man, but a creature quite separate from all others."       -Death of Ivan Ilyich (280)


"He experienced the unfortunate ability of many people, especially Russians - the ability to see and believe in the possibility of goodness and truth, and to see the evil and falsehood of life too clearly to be able to participate in it seriously. Every sphere of work was, in his eyes, bound up with evilness and deceit. Whatever he tried to be, whatever he undertook - evil and falsehood repulsed him and barred him from all paths of activity. And yet he had to live, he had to keep busy. It was too frightening to be under the burden of all the insoluble questions of life, and he gave himself to the first amusements that came along, only so as to forget them." -War & Peace (538)


"A good player who loses at chess is genuinely convinced that he has lost because of a mistake, and he looks for this mistake in the beginning of his game, but forgets that there were also mistakes at every step in the course of the game, that none of his moves was perfect. The mistake he pays attention to is conspicuous only because his opponent took advantage of it." -War & Peace (709)


She now saw his face before her. Not the face she had known ever since she could remember, and which she had always seen from a distance, but the face – timid and weak – which on the last day, as she bent close to his mouth to hear what he said, she had seen for the first time close up, with all its wrinkles and details.  War & Peace (730)


"With the enemy’s approach to Moscow, the Muscovites’ view of their situation not only did not become more serious, but, on the contrary, became still more light minded, as always happens with people who see great danger approaching. At the approach of danger, two voices always speak with equal force in a man’s soul: one quite reasonably tells the man to consider the properties of the danger and the means of saving himself from it; the other says still more reasonably that it is too painful and tormenting to think about the danger, when it is not in the man’s power to foresee everything and save himself from the general course of things, and therefore it is better to turn away from the painful things until they come and think about what is pleasant. In solitude, a man most often yields to the first voice; in company, on the contrary to the second." -War & Peace (745)
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I'll be collecting more quotes as I re-read Anna Karenina and go through more readings. Anyway, don't let the size of works like War & Peace or Anna Karenina intimidate you from reading some of his works! Tolstoy has many brilliant short stories as well, and anyone interested in literature should definitely read at least one of his pieces.

On Weakness

Recently, I’ve been experiencing my shortcomings in visceral ways. I choose this sentence in place of something like “I’ve realized my shortcomings” because I want to emphasize two words. Those words are “experiencing” and “visceral.” In this post, I’d like to elaborate on why those two words have caused me to see weakness in a new light.

First is “experiencing.” It’s not difficult to “know” what weakness means. All character driven stories use it for plot and character development. We’ve seen and judged someone else’s weaknesses before. We’ve all felt weak ourselves, and how we interact with this experience is often a defining element in developing our self-esteem and identity.

In all of this, it’s tempting to take weakness as a concept and simplify it. Perhaps it just becomes a hurdle to overcome, or even something intellectual and abstract.

But as I experience my own weaknesses more, I feel that one simply can’t describe it in such a manner. One cannot define its meaning neatly. One cannot lift it to the abstract world like he/she can with love and death. With such concepts, it’s at least possible to understand a little bit of its essence with artistic mediums or perhaps through hearing personal stories. But doing this to weakness not only fails to capture its meaning, but often misrepresents it. Understanding weakness on any level must be personal.

The true meaning of weakness lies in those times where the mind comprehends its own faults and yet cannot seem to avoid them. We catch a glimpse when we not only read about the tragedies in history, but somehow feel their weight and the impact in our own lives and the world around us. It begins to show itself when personal effort and conviction fail.  The list could go on eternally, because one experience can capture many different meanings of this word “weakness” depending on the person.

And in all of these experiences, the word that immediately came to my mind to describe them is “visceral.” It is all instinctual, illogical, often ugly and even crude. I don’t think there’s a sure way to tell when we are starting to know weakness, but if I had to hazard a guess, it’s when we behave viscerally. Everything that we have formed around us falls away and we are left with something so strange and animalistic that it’s impossible to convey it in words.

After this cloud passes, only then can we begin to understand what “weakness” is. The tone of this post has been rather grim. I apologize if I have misrepresented weakness as I inevitably would as I write about it. In reality, I think that the key element of any wise person is that they have had this visceral experience. Such a person begins to understand weakness and I would speculate humanity itself. This understanding is powerful. It has so much potential for helping others. But it also has unlimited potential for exploitation.