Ikigai Daily
Menu
StillnessQuote

All happy families are alike; each unhappy family is unhappy in its own way.

Leo Tolstoy, Anna Karenina

Literature

The story behind the card

This is the first sentence of Anna Karenina. Leo Tolstoy (1828–1910), the Russian author of War and Peace, published the novel in instalments from 1875 to 1877, mostly in the magazine The Russian Messenger, and as a book in 1878. The next line opens on the Oblonsky household, in turmoil after the husband's affair. The sentence also gave its name to the 'Anna Karenina principle', popularised by Jared Diamond: success needs many things to go right at once, while failure can come from any one of them going wrong.

Türkçe oku
Bütün mutlu aileler birbirine benzer; her mutsuz ailenin ise kendine özgü bir mutsuzluğu vardır.
Lev Tolstoy, Anna Karenina

Bu, Anna Karenina'nın ilk cümlesidir. Savaş ve Barış'ın da yazarı olan Rus romancı Lev Tolstoy (1828–1910), bu romanı 1875–1877 arasında bölüm bölüm yayımladı; bölümlerin çoğu Rus Habercisi dergisinde çıktı. Roman, kitap olarak 1878'de basıldı. Hemen ardından gelen cümle, kocanın ihanetiyle altüst olmuş Oblonski ailesinin evini anlatır. Açılış cümlesi, Jared Diamond'ın yaygınlaştırdığı “Anna Karenina ilkesi”ne de adını vermiştir: Başarı için pek çok şeyin aynı anda yolunda gitmesi gerekir, başarısızlık ise bunlardan herhangi birinin aksamasıyla gelir.

Sources and further reading

Background reading: Leo Tolstoy
Get the mobile appAbout our cards

Related cards

These cards share a subject or reading mode with the card above.

StillnessLiterature

The wound is where the light enters you.

The sentence condenses lines by Coleman Barks, the American poet whose free versions made Rumi a bestseller in English; Barks did not read Persian and reworked scholarly translations. His poem “Childhood Friends” (1990) urges the reader to keep looking at “the bandaged place”, where the light enters. It draws on the Masnavi of Rumi, the 13th-century Persian poet and Sufi mystic of Konya, who tells the wounded not to turn away from the plaster a spiritual guide lays on them: the healing comes from its light, not from themselves.

Attributed to Rumi; exact English sentence not matched to a standard textRead card
StillnessLiterature

The rose's lover must endure the thorn.

The Turkish Language Association's dictionary explains that people put up with the troubles that come with someone, or some work, they love. The rose and its thorn are an old pair in Turkish and Persian poetry; in classical Ottoman verse the nightingale longs for the rose, and the thorn often stands for the pain of love. English has “No rose without a thorn”, as does Turkish, “Dikensiz gül olmaz”, but this proverb adds that whoever loves the rose accepts its thorn.

Turkish, Persian variants ProverbRead card
StillnessLiterature

I've fallen in love, or imagine that I have. I went to a party and lost my head. I bought a horse, which I don't need at all.

Leo Tolstoy wrote this in his diary in Moscow on 25 January 1851, when he was 22 and still years away from War and Peace. Eight days earlier, on 17 January, he had set out his money troubles in the same diary: overdue promissory notes, no cash, plans to sell a horse and even to pawn his watch. In the 25 January entry, after the unnecessary purchase, he set himself two rules: do not offer a price for a thing you do not need, and on arriving at a ball, ask someone to dance at once. Tolstoy began keeping a diary at 18 and kept it, with gaps, until his death in 1910, using it to watch himself and to set rules he often broke. Before his wedding in 1862 he gave his diaries to his fiancée, Sophia Behrs, to read.

Leo Tolstoy, from his diariesRead card
StillnessLiterature

In every religion there is love, yet love has no religion.

This sentence has not been found in Rumi's writings, but it echoes a story in his Masnavi, the long Persian poem he dictated in Konya. Moses hears a shepherd offering, in homely words, to mend God's shoes, comb his hair and bring him milk. Moses scolds him, and God rebukes Moses: he was sent to bring people closer, not to drive them away. God's answer includes the line “The religion of love is apart from all religions.” When Rumi died in 1273, Christians and Jews joined his mourners.

Rumi (popular attribution)Read card
StillnessLiterature

Sometimes a man must fight so hard for life that he doesn't have time to live it.

The line is shared widely under Bukowski's name, but no poem, novel or letter containing it has been found. Born in Germany in 1920 and raised in Los Angeles, he spent more than a decade as a filing clerk at the city's post office. In 1969 his publisher, John Martin, offered him financial support to write full time. Bukowski wrote that he could stay and go crazy, or leave and starve: “I have decided to starve.” Within a month he had finished his first novel, Post Office.

Charles Bukowski (attributed)Read card
Next card in the archiveIn Plato's Apology, Socrates says he is wiser in one small way than a man who thinks he knows things he does not: he does not think he knows what he does not know. The familiar 'I know that I know nothing' is a later paraphrase, not his words.Read next →