The worst feature of the Common Core is its anti-humanistic, utilitarian approach to education. It mistakes what a child is and what a human being is for. That is why it has no use for...

And so there was no single cause for war, but it happened simply because it had to happen

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

In the post-Warhol era a single gesture such as uncrossing one’s legs will have more significance than all the pages in War and Peace.

If everyone fought only for his own convictions, there would be no wars.

I took a speed-reading course and read War and Peace in twenty minutes. It involves Russia.

I’ll be your Dostoevsky, if you’ll be my Tolstoy. Our life together will be so full of despair that death will be like a gulag full of joy.

Just as a painter needs light in order to put the finishing touches to his picture, so I need an inner light, which I feel I never have enough of in the autumn.

Gordie, the white boy genius, gave me this book by a Russian dude named Tolstoy, who wrote, ‘Happy families are all alike; every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way.’ Well, I hate to...

Nothing,’ wrote Tolstoy, ‘can make our life, or the lives of other people, more beautiful than perpetual kindness.

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...

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...

If laughter came in paste format you could squeeze out of a tube, I’ll bet nine out of ten dentists would recommend comedy before bed. The tenth doctor, having just read Tolstoy as deliberately mistranslated...

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.

Tomorrow”)

God help me, how Tolstoy sweats over drying up people’s sources of life, of wild and joyful life, drying them up and making the world fat with the love of God and everyman. … But...

if they hadn’t both been pretending, but had had what is called a heart-to-heart talk, that is, simply told each other just what they were thinking and feeling, then they would just have looked into...

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.

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...

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.

what if” scenarios–what if x had never happened, what if y had happened instead?–because we like to believe that individual decisions make a difference: that, if not for x, or if only there had been...

Anna Mikhaylovna was already embracing her and weeping. The countess wept too. They wept because they were friends, and because they were kindhearted, and because they – friends from childhood – had to think about...

Art is bad when ‘you see the intent and get put off.’ (Goethe) In Tolstoy one is unaware of the intent, and sees only the thing itself. from the book, On Retranslating A Russian Classic...

Art is the uniting of the subjective with the objective,of nature with reason, of the unconscious with the conscious, and therefore art is the highest means of knowledge.

They certified that I was sane; but I know that I am mad.” This confession gives us the key to what is most important and significant in Tolstoy’s hidden life.

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 the baby into the city’s...