Leo Tolstoy
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"Lev Nikolayevich Tolstoy", also known as "Leo Tolstoy", was a Russians/Russian novelist, short story writer, essayist, playwright and philosopher who primarily wrote novels and short story/short stories. Tolstoy was a master of realistic fiction and is widely considered one of the greatest novelists of all time. He is best known for two long novels, War and Peace (1869) and Anna Karenina (1877). Tolstoy first achieved literary acclaim in his 20s with his semi-autobiographical trilogy of novels, Childhood (novel)/Childhood, Boyhood (novel)/Boyhood, and Youth (Leo Tolstoy novel)/Youth (1852–1856) and Sevastopol Sketches (1855), based on his experiences in the Crimean War. His fiction output also includes two additional novels, dozens of short stories, and several famous novellas, including The Death of Ivan Ilyich, Family Happiness, and Hadji Murat (novel)/Hadji Murad. In addition to novels and short stories, he also wrote play (theater)/plays and philosophical essays on Christianity, nonviolent resistance, art and pacifism.

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Everyone thinks of changing the world, but no one thinks of changing himself.

Everything that I understand, I understand only because I love.

Happy families are all alike; every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way.

The strongest of all warriors are these two -- Time and Patience.

Truth, like gold, is to be obtained not by its growth, but by washing away from it all that is not gold.

True life is lived when tiny changes occur.

I know that most men, including those at ease with problems of the greatest complexity, can seldom accept even the simplest and most obvious truth if it be such as would oblige them to admit the falsity of conlusions which they have delighted in explaining to colleages, which they have proudly taught to others, and which they have woven, thread by thread, into the fabric of their lives.

Nietzsche was stupid and abnormal.

If one has no vanity in this life of ours, there is no sufficient reason for living.

Art is not a handicraft, it is the transmission of feeling the artist has experienced.

What a strange illusion it is to suppose that beauty is goodness.

What counts in making a happy marriage is not so much how compatible you are, but how you deal with incompatibility.

If I were told that what I shall write will be read in twenty years by the children of today and that they will weep and smile over it and will fall in love with life, I would devote all my life and all my strengths to it.

Crude, immoral, vulgar and senseless.

She had wit, she had grace, she had beauty; But above all, she had truth.

Historians are like deaf people who go on answering questions that no one has asked them.

A man is like a fraction whose numerator is what he is and whose denominator is what he thinks of himself. The larger the denominator the smaller the fraction.

In the name of God, stop a moment, cease your work, look around you.