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.
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] 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...
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.
Everything was made bright by her. She was the smile that shed light all around her.
Yes, it was real hatred - not the hatred we only read about in novels, which I do not believe in, hatred that is supposed to find satisfaction in doing some one harm - but the hatred that fills you wi...
The Lord had given them the day and the Lord had given them the strength. And the day and the strength had been dedicated to labor, and the labor was its reward. Who was the labor for? What would be i...
In my considered opinion, salary is payment for goods delivered and it must conform to the law of supply and demand. If, therefore, the fixed salary is a violation of this law - as, for instance, when...
...Tolstoy said, happiness is an allegory, unhappiness a story - then what does that make us?...
Convinced that their own ideas were the key to the future of the world, that the fate of humanity rested on the outcome of their own doctrinal struggles, the Russian intelligentsia divided up the worl...
Every novel says to the reader: Things are not as simple as you think. That is the novel’s eternal truth, but it grows steadily harder to hear amid the din of easy, quick answers that come faster than...
Everyone thinks of changing the world, but no one thinks of changing himself.
Freddie experienced the sort of abysmal soul-sadness which afflicts one of Tolstoy's Russian peasants when, after putting in a heavy day's work strangling his father, beating his wife, and dropping th...
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...
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.
I've always loved you, and when you love someone, you love the whole person, just as he or she is, and not as you would like them to be.
In 1908, in a wild and remote area of the North Caucasus, Leo Tolstoy, the greatest writer of the age, was the guest of a tribal chief living far away from civilized life in the mountains. Gathering h...
Art is the uniting of the subjective with the objective,
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