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
The question of how things will settle down is the only important question.
Interpretation
What this quote means
This quote emphasizes the significance of understanding the resolution of conflicts and situations over the initial turbulence they cause.
Leo Tolstoy highlights that amidst chaos and uncertainty, what truly matters is the eventual outcome and how things will stabilize. The emphasis is placed on the resolution rather than the turmoil, suggesting that our focus should be on seeking clarity and understanding in a world filled with complexity.
Themes
ResolutionOutcomeChaosUnderstandingImportance
In practice
Example use cases
During a team meeting, when discussing project challenges, one might use this quote to emphasize focusing on solutions.
More from Leo Tolstoy
All quotes →Pierre 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 — such is my idea of happiness.
Leo TolstoyRead
Similar quotes
Astounded—and indifferent—for he was a man who, in effect, had no ‘day before’.
Oliver SacksRead
We are the dead. Our only true life is in the future.
George OrwellRead
..where effective competition can be created, it is a better way of guiding individual efforts than any other... regards competition as superior not only because it is in most circumstances the most efficient method known but even more because it is the only method by which our activities can be adjusted to each other without coercive or arbitrary intervention of authority.
Friedrich August Von HayekRead
Theology asserts propositions that cannot be proven true; ideologues hold stoutly to a worldview despite being contradicted by what is generally accepted as reality. When ideology and theology couple, their offspring are not always bad but they are always blind. And there is the danger: voters and politicians alike, oblivious to the facts.
Bill MoyersRead
Our best built certainties are but sand-houses and subject to damage from any wind of doubt that blows
Mark TwainRead
I tell my children what I think myself: That religion is not necessarily convincing, but it is still interesting and not to be laughed at or denigrated.
Alain De BottonRead