Leo Tolstoy Novelist
- Gender: Male
- Citizenship: Russian Empire
- Born: Sep 9, 1828
- Died: Nov 20, 1910
Count Lev Nikolayevich Tolstoy, also known as Leo Tolstoy, was a Russian novelist, short story writer, philosopher and playwright who primarily wrote novels and short stories. Tolstoy was a master of realistic fiction and is widely considered one of the greatest novelists of all time. He is best known for two long novels, War and Peace and Anna Karenina. Tolstoy first achieved literary acclaim in his 20s with his semi-autobiographical trilogy of novels, Childhood, Boyhood, and Youth and Sevastopol Sketches, based on his experiences in the Crimean War. His fiction output also includes two additional novels, dozens of short stories, and several famous novellas, including The Death of Ivan Ilyich, Family Happiness, and Hadji Murad. Later in life, he also wrote plays and essays.
Tolstoy is equally known for his complicated and paradoxical persona and for his extreme moralistic and ascetic views, which he adopted after a moral crisis and spiritual awakening in the 1870s, after which he also became noted as a moral thinker, social reformer, and Georgist.
Even in the valley of the shadow of death, two and two do not make six.
death
The two most powerful warriors are patience and time.
patience & time
The greater the state, the more wrong and cruel its patriotism, and the greater is the sum of suffering upon which its power is founded.
patriotism & power
All violence consists in some people forcing others, under threat of suffering or death, to do what they do not want to do.
death
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.
nature
War is so unjust and ugly that all who wage it must try to stifle the voice of conscience within themselves.
war
One of the first conditions of happiness is that the link between Man and Nature shall not be broken.
happiness & nature
Music is the shorthand of emotion.
music
All, everything that I understand, I understand only because I love.
love
It is amazing how complete is the delusion that beauty is goodness.
amazing & beauty
Art is not a handicraft, it is the transmission of feeling the artist has experienced.
art
If so many men, so many minds, certainly so many hearts, so many kinds of love.
love & men
In the name of God, stop a moment, cease your work, look around you.
God & work
Government is an association of men who do violence to the rest of us.
government & men
Truth, like gold, is to be obtained not by its growth, but by washing away from it all that is not gold.
truth
True life is lived when tiny changes occur.
change
All happy families resemble one another, each unhappy family is unhappy in its own way.
family
Without knowing what I am and why I am here, life is impossible.
life
There is no greatness where there is no simplicity, goodness and truth.
truth
Everyone thinks of changing the world, but no one thinks of changing himself.
change