Art begins when a man, with a purpose of communicating to other people a feeling he once experienced, calls it up again within himself and expresses it by certain external signs.
Leo TolstoyRead
Then we should find some artificial inoculation against love, as with smallpox.
Interpretation
What this quote means
This quote suggests that love can be harmful and that we might need a way to protect ourselves from its pains.
In this quote, Tolstoy compares love to a disease, proposing the idea that just as we create vaccines to protect ourselves from smallpox, we should also find a way to shield ourselves from the emotional turmoil that love can bring. This reflects the complex nature of love, where its potential for joy is often accompanied by suffering, highlighting the human desire to avoid heartbreak and longing.
Themes
LoveInoculationProtectionEmotionSuffering
In practice
Example use cases
This quote can be used in a discussion about the pains of romantic relationships.
More from Leo Tolstoy
All quotes βPierre looked into the sky, into the depths of the retreating, twinkling stars. "And all this is mine, and all this is in me, and all this is me!" thought Pierre. "And all this they've caught and put in a shed and boarded it up!
Leo TolstoyRead
People try to do all sorts of clever and difficult things to improve life instead of doing the simplest, easiest thing-refusing to participate in activities that make life bad.
Leo TolstoyRead
It's too easy to criticize a man when he's out of favour, and to make him shoulder the blame for everybody else's mistakes.
Leo TolstoyRead
Music is the shorthand of emotion. Emotions, which let themselves be described in words with such difficulty, are directly conveyed to man in music, and in that is its power and significance.
Leo TolstoyRead
A quiet secluded life in the country, with the possibility of being useful to people to whom it is easy to do good, and who are not accustomed to have it done to them; then work which one hopes may be of some use; then rest, nature, books, music, love for one's neighbor β such is my idea of happiness.
Leo TolstoyRead
Similar quotes
Love alone can explain the mysteries of Love.
RumiRead
The biggest of all differences in this world is between the ones that had or have pleasure in love and those that haven't and hadn't any pleasure in love, but just watched with sick envy.
Tennessee WilliamsRead
If you love something - and there are things that I love - you do want more and more and more of it, but that's not the way to produce good work.
J. K. RowlingRead
She would follow, her dream of love, the dictates of her heart that told her he was her all in all, the only man in all the world for her for love was the master guide. Come what might she would be wild, untrammelled, free.
James JoyceRead
She loved him absolutely, perhaps for half an hour.
E. M. ForsterRead
The scene I had just witnessed (a couple making love in the ocean) brought back a lot of memories β not of things I had done but of things I had failed to do, wasted hours and frustrated moments and opportunities forever lost because time had eaten so much of my life and I would never get it back. I envied Yeoman and felt sorry for myself at the same time, because I had seen him in a moment that made all my happiness seem dull.
Hunter S. ThompsonRead