Tolstoy Unhappy Quotes & Sayings

Being, by life itself, that man is created for happiness, that happiness is within him, in the satisfaction of simple human needs, and that all unhappiness arises not from privation but from superfluity. And now during these last three weeks of the march he had learned still another new, consolatory truth - that nothing in this world is terrible. He had learned that as there is no condition in which man can be happy and entirely free, so there is no condition in which he need be unhappy and lack freedom. He learned that suffering and freedom have their limits and that those limits are very near together; that the person in a bed of roses with one crumpled petal suffered as keenly as he now, sleeping on the bare damp earth with one side growing chilled while the — Leo Tolstoy

Every happy family is happy in the same way. Every unhappy family is unhappy in different ways. — Leo Tolstoy

You can't really like flowers." Again those dark eyes shifted to her. Blinked once. I most certainly do, he seemed to say. She — Sarah J. Maas

While it's true that, as Tolstoy observed, every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way, and everyone on planet Earth, vale of tears that it is, is certainly entitled to the specificity of his or her suffering, one nonetheless likes to think that literature has the power to render comprehensible different kinds of unhappiness. If it can't do that, what's it good for? — Elif Batuman

HYMN OF THE DIVINE DANDELION

I am born as the sun,
But then turn into the moon,
As my blonde hairs turn
Grayish-white and fall
To the ground,
Only to be buried again,
Then to be born again,
Into a thousand suns
And a thousand
Moons.

Suzy Kassem — Suzy Kassem

If Bill was all id, Hillary is all superego. — Rich Lowry

Then he thought himself unhappy, but happiness was all in the future; now he felt that the best happiness was already in the past. — Leo Tolstoy

There is no condition in which man can be happy and entirely free, so there is no condition in which he need be unhappy and lack freedom. — Leo Tolstoy

I'm like a starving man who has been given food. Maybe he's cold, and his clothes are torn, and he's ashamed, but he's not unhappy. — Leo Tolstoy

You cannot write on the heart of another what you do not feel yourself. — Gene Stratton-Porter

You're trying to help them ... that's a good thing. But you can't always count on seeing their gratitude," he said wanting to comfort her before he added a grain of salt. "You know what Tolstoy said ... if you are unhappy with your life, you can change it in two ways ... either improve the conditions you live in or improve your inner spiritual state. The first isn't always possible but the second is ... In the end, Alex, people need to go directly to the source of Grace for themselves. — Paul Alkazraji

I reread my grandmother's letter and realized with a deep sense of contentment that I had not had to change at all in order to have every hope for happiness in life. I had not had to learn to sing for company or to behave like Cecily or to stop twirling. I could be myself and be loved deeply. I was, in fact, a lot like Meg, who had always been a racehorse, I just hadn't known it. — Julianne Donaldson

In a vacuum all photons travel at the same speed. They slow down when travelling through air or water or glass. Photons of different energies are slowed down at different rates. If Tolstoy had known this, would he have recognised the terrible untruth at the beginning of Anna Karenina? 'All happy families are alike; every unhappy family is unhappy in its own particular way.' In fact it's the other way around. Happiness is a specific. Misery is a generalisation. People usually know exactly why they are happy. They very rarely know why they are miserable. — Jeanette Winterson

What is reason given me for, if I am not to use it to avoid bringing unhappy beings into the world! — Leo Tolstoy

He felt that he could not turn aside from himself the hatred of men, because that hatred did not come from his being bad (in that case he could have tried to be better), but from his being shamefully and repulsively unhappy. He knew that for this, for the very fact that his heart was torn with grief, they would be merciless to him. He felt that men would crush him as dogs strangle a torn dog yelping with pain. He knew that his sole means of security against people was to hide his wounds from them — Leo Tolstoy

my mind continually tiptoed to Georgia on the other side of my wall. I could imagine upswept hair and long limbs spilling over the white porcelain of the tub, dark lashes on a smooth cheek, full lips softly parted, and I resisted the urge to start painting all the little details my mind readily supplied. If Vermeer could find beauty in cracks and stains, then I could only imagine what I could create from the pores of her skin. — Amy Harmon

No honor, no heart, no religion; a corrupt woman. I always knew it and always saw it, though I tried to deceive myself to spare her," he said to himself. And it actually seemed to him that he always had seen it: he recalled incidents of their past life, in which he had never seen anything wrong before - now these incidents proved clearly that she had always been a corrupt woman. "I made a mistake in linking my life to hers; but there was nothing wrong in my mistake, and so I cannot be unhappy. It's not I that am to blame," he told himself, "but she. But I have nothing to do with her. She does not exist for me ... — Leo Tolstoy

A bribe is just a promise, turned on its head. — Brandon Sanderson

In the opening to the Mary Tyler Moore Show Mary's in the supermarket, hurrying through the aisles. She pauses at the meat case, picks up a steak and checks the price. Then rolls her eyes, shrugs and tosses it in the cart. That's kind of how I feel. Sure I would have liked things to be different. But, 'roll of eyes' what can you do? 'shrug' I threw the meat in my cart and moved on. — Augusten Burroughs

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 argue with a Russian genius, but Tolstoy didn't know Indians, and he didn't know that all Indian families are unhappy for the same exact reasons: the frikkin' booze. — Sherman Alexie

How strange it was to think that he, who such a short time ago dared not believe in the happiness of her loving him, now felt unhappy because she loved him too much! — Leo Tolstoy

Self-conceit is a sentiment entirely incompatible with genuine sorrow, and it is so firmly engrafted on human nature that even the most profound sorrow can seldom expel it altogether. Vanity in sorrow expresses itself by a desire to appear either stricken with grief or unhappy or brave: and this ignoble desire which we do not acknowledge but which hardly ever leaves us even in the deepest trouble robs our grief of its strength, dignity and sincerity. — Leo Tolstoy

her ear, wondering if she'd heard him — Nicholas Sparks

She began to wish he would die; yet she did not want him to die because then his salary would cease. And this irritated her against him still more. She considered herself dreadfully unhappy just because not even his death could save her, — Leo Tolstoy

If you catch them at 12 years old, which they are working very aggressively to do and you tell those children that if you have an attraction towards someone of the same gender, that means you're gay and because you're gay you need to come with us. — Scott Lively

Tolstoy had written something about happy families being all alike and unhappy ones each unhappy in its own way. — Alan Bradley

Tolstoy may be right about happy and unhappy families, but in ballet, it works the opposite way: All good ballets are different from each other and all bad ones are alike, at least in one crucial respect - they're all empty. — Robert Gottlieb

He had learned that, as there is no situation in the world in which a man can be happy and perfectly free, so there is no situation in which he can be perfectly unhappy and unfree. — Leo Tolstoy