(1828–1910)
Russian writer“Thought: To think you can change your life by changing its outward conditions is just like thinking, as I did as a boy, that by sitting on a stick and taking hold of it at both ends I could lift myself up.”
more infosource: January 15, 1891 entry, in Tolstoy’s Diaries Volume 1, 1847–1894, trans. by R. F. Christian (London: Faber and Faber, 2010), 300.
category: change, illusion, thought, transformation
medium: Journal
“Keep your clothes neat and tidy; it gives you self-confidence and composure in your bearings.”
more infosource: January 6, 1854 entry, in Tolstoy’s Diaries Volume 1, 1847–1894, trans. by R. F. Christian (London: Faber and Faber, 2010), 83.
category: appearance, clothing, composure, self-confidence
medium: Journal
“Read a wonderful definition by Henry James (senior) of what true progress is. Progress is a process like the modeling and carving of a statue from a block of marble, the elimination of all that is superfluous. The marble, the material, is nothing. The important thing is the carving, the trimming off of the superfluous.”
more infosource: March 9, 1891 entry, in Tolstoy’s Diaries: Volume 1 1847-1894. Selected, ed., and trans. by R. F. Christian (London: Faber and Faber, 2010), 304.
category: carving, edit, elimination, progress, subtraction
medium: Diary
Leo Tolstoy