Orlando Figes Quote

...Tolstoy said, happiness is an allegory, unhappiness a story - then what does that make us?...

One day at Fenner's (the university cricket ground at Cambridge), just before the last war, G. H. Hardy and I were talking about Einstein. Hardy had met him several times, and I had recently returned...

He stepped down, avoiding any long look at her as one avoids long looks at the sun, but seeing her as one sees the sun, without looking.

[Tolstoy] does not necessarily get rid of [his angry] temperament by undergoing religious conversion, and indeed it is obvious that the illusion of having been reborn may allow one's native vices to f...

I know that I am going to meet a personal variation on reality; a partial view of reality. But I know also that by that partiality, that distancing from the shared experience, it will be new: a revela...

It seems to me that what we call beauty in a face lies in the smile: if the smile heightens the charm of the face, the face is a beautiful one; if it does not alter it, the face is ordinary, and if it...

Tolstoy said, 'The antagonism between life and conscience may be removed either by a change of life or by a change of conscience.' Many of us have elected to adjust our consciences rather than our liv...

And not only the pride of intellect, but the stupidity of intellect. And, above all, the dishonesty, yes, the dishonesty of intellect. Yes, indeed, the dishonesty and trickery of intellect.

How strange it is that when I was a child I tried to be like a grownup, yet as soon as I ceased to be a child I often longed to be like one.

Before and after the funeral I never ceased to cry and be miserable, but it makes me ashamed when I think back on that sadness of mine, seeing that always in it was an element of self-love - now a des...