Leo Tolstoy Quotes From War and Peace, Anna Karenina and More

The best Tolstoy quotes run from the most famous first line in Russian fiction to a wounded prince staring at the sky and a farmer who forgets himself while mowing. Below are fourteen, from Anna Karenina, War and Peace and Resurrection, each copied from a public-domain English translation, with book, part and chapter so you can find it yourself.

The translations matter. Anna Karenina is quoted here in Constance Garnett’s version, War and Peace in Louise and Aylmer Maude’s, and Resurrection in Louise Maude’s. Other translators word these lines differently, so a quote that sounds slightly off may simply come from a later translation.

Tolstoy quotes from Anna Karenina

1. Happy families

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

Advertisement

Leo Tolstoy, Anna Karenina, Part One, chapter 1 (trans. Constance Garnett)

The line sounds like a thesis, and the very next sentence undercuts it with farce: Everything was in confusion in the Oblonskys’ house. Stiva Oblonsky has been caught with the French governess, and the novel’s first unhappy family is a comic one. Anna arrives to make peace in their marriage before her own falls apart.

2. Opinions like a hat

Stepan Arkadyevitch had not chosen his political opinions or his views; these political opinions and views had come to him of themselves, just as he did not choose the shapes of his hat and coat, but simply took those that were being worn.

Anna Karenina, Part One, chapter 3

Tolstoy’s satire at its gentlest. Oblonsky reads a liberal paper because his set does, and the narrator adds that his views imperceptibly changed of themselves within him when the majority changed. Anyone who has watched opinions move through a dinner party will know the type.

3. Anna on the train

Anna Arkadyevna read and understood, but it was distasteful to her to read, that is, to follow the reflection of other people’s lives. She had too great a desire to live herself.

Anna Karenina, Part One, chapter 29

Anna is going home to Petersburg with an English novel, having just met Vronsky. Every time the heroine does something, Anna wants to do it instead. It is a sharp line for a reading site to quote: a novelist describing a woman too alive for novels, inside a novel. Our quotes about reading has more lines like it.

4. Levin mowing

The longer Levin mowed, the oftener he felt the moments of unconsciousness in which it seemed not his hands that swung the scythe, but the scythe mowing of itself, a body full of life and consciousness of its own

Anna Karenina, Part Three, chapter 5

Levin, the landowner, spends a day mowing with his peasants and loses himself in the work. The narrator calls these the most blissful moments, and the hard part is having to stop and think, to steer round a hillock. It is the best description of losing yourself in physical work that I know.

5. The light goes out

And the light by which she had read the book filled with troubles, falsehoods, sorrow, and evil, flared up more brightly than ever before, lighted up for her all that had been in darkness, flickered, began to grow dim, and was quenched forever.

Anna Karenina, Part Seven, chapter 31

Anna’s death, and Tolstoy reaches back to Part One, where she read her English novel by a lamp on the train. Now her life is the book. The sentence moves in stages, flare, flicker, dim, quenched, and then Part Eight begins with Sergey Ivanovitch’s book, as if the world has simply carried on.

6. Levin’s last word

but my life now, my whole life apart from anything that can happen to me, every minute of it is no more meaningless, as it was before, but it has the positive meaning of goodness, which I have the power to put into it.

Anna Karenina, Part Eight, chapter 19, last sentence

The novel is called Anna Karenina, but it ends with Levin, alone, thinking. Just before this he admits he will still lose his temper with the coachman and still argue. Nothing about his life will look different. That is the point: the change is inside, which is why it closes a book rather than opening a sequel.

Tolstoy quotes from War and Peace

7. Genoa and Lucca

“Well, Prince, so Genoa and Lucca are now just family estates of the Buonapartes.

Leo Tolstoy, War and Peace, Book One: 1805, chapter I (trans. Louise and Aylmer Maude)

The great war novel opens with gossip at a Petersburg party. The hostess, Anna Pavlovna, is chattering about Napoleon, whom she calls Antichrist in the same breath, to her guest Prince Vasili. Tolstoy lets the war arrive the way news does, as small talk, long before anyone is shot.

8. The sky at Austerlitz

Above him there was now nothing but the sky—the lofty sky, not clear yet still immeasurably lofty, with gray clouds gliding slowly across it.

War and Peace, Book Three: 1805, chapter XVI

Prince Andrew has charged with a flag, been struck on the head and fallen on his back. Moments before, he wanted glory. Now he thinks, How was it I did not see that lofty sky before? It is the novel’s first great conversion, and it happens to a man lying in the mud with no idea who has won.

9. Pierre at the post station

“All we can know is that we know nothing. And that’s the height of human wisdom.”

War and Peace, Book Five: 1806, chapter I

Pierre, just parted from his wife Hélène, is stuck at the Torzhok post station waiting for horses, and spiralling. This is despair dressed as philosophy, and it does not last: in the next chapter he meets a Freemason who tells him that The highest wisdom and truth are like the purest liquid we may wish to imbibe, and Pierre is converted on the spot.

10. Natasha dances

Where, how, and when had this young countess, educated by an émigrée French governess, imbibed from the Russian air she breathed that spirit and obtained that manner which the pas de châle would, one would have supposed, long ago have effaced?

War and Peace, Book Seven: 1810, chapter VII

After a hunt, at “Uncle’s” house in the country, Natasha throws off her shawl and dances a peasant dance nobody taught her. The narrator never answers his own question, which is the answer. It is the most joyful scene in the book, and the one readers tend to remember when they have forgotten the battles. For more on music and fiction, see our books about music.

11. Pierre laughs

“The soldier did not let me pass. They took me and shut me up. They hold me captive. What, me? Me? My immortal soul? Ha-ha-ha! Ha-ha-ha!…”

War and Peace, Book Thirteen: 1812, chapter XIV

Pierre is a French prisoner, and a sentry has just stopped him crossing the road to talk to the other prisoners. He bursts out laughing, so loudly that men turn to look. Nobody can imprison a soul, and the idea strikes him as hilarious. It is one of the strangest moments in the novel: freedom discovered in a prison camp, by a large man laughing alone.

12. Patience and time

“Patience and time are my warriors, my champions,” thought Kutúzov.

War and Peace, Book Thirteen: 1812, chapter XVII

Kutuzov, the old commander, wants to let the French army rot rather than attack it. He says nearly the same thing aloud to Prince Andrew in Book Ten, chapter XVI: not storming and attacking but patience and time are wanted. The popular version, the strongest of all warriors are these two, time and patience, is not the Maudes’ wording. Check the translation before you put it on a poster. Our book quotes about time has more on time.

Tolstoy quotes from Resurrection

13. Spring in the city

Though hundreds of thousands had done their very best to disfigure the small piece of land on which they were crowded together, by paving the ground with stones, scraping away every vestige of vegetation, cutting down the trees, turning away birds and beasts, and filling the air with the smoke of naphtha and coal, still spring was spring, even in the town.

Leo Tolstoy, Resurrection, Book I, chapter I (trans. Louise Maude)

A long, angry list, and then four plain words that undo it. The chapter is titled “Maslova in Prison”, and the spring is there to contrast with the prison where the heroine, Maslova, has spent three months before her trial. Tolstoy’s late novels argue openly; this one starts by making nature take the side of the argument.

14. Men are like rivers

Men are like rivers: the water is the same in each, and alike in all; but every river is narrow here, is more rapid there, here slower, there broader, now clear, now cold, now dull, now warm.

Resurrection, Book I, chapter LIX

The narrator stops the story to attack One of the most widespread superstitions, that people have fixed qualities. Then he applies it to the hero, Nekhludoff, who changes quickly. It is a novelist’s theory of character, and a warning against the kind of quote collection that reduces a writer to one mood.

Quick reference: Tolstoy quotes by book and chapter

A note on the Resurrection translation

Louise Maude’s preface opens with a complaint about spelling: Tolstoy writes his own name “Tolstoy”, so why insist on “Tolstoi”? She also explains that Tolstoy gave all the proceeds of the novel to aiding the Doukhobors, a sect who were persecuted in the Caucasus for refusing military service, and that her translator’s fee would go to the same cause. The Gutenberg text even reproduces a note in Tolstoy’s hand authorising that English version. For a Russian who wrote far stranger sentences, try our Gogol quotes.

Sources

• Leo Tolstoy, Anna Karenina, trans. Constance Garnett, Project Gutenberg
• Leo Tolstoy, War and Peace, trans. Louise and Aylmer Maude, Project Gutenberg
• Leo Tolstoy, Resurrection, trans. Louise Maude, Project Gutenberg