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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.
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