Leo Tolstoy

Its professors [at the University of Kazan, where Tolstoy studied Jurisprudence] were mostly crotchety German pedants who mangled the Russian language and achieved that pitiful kind of academic individualism acquired by practicing all manners of eccentricities.

...no genius ever violated self-made rules of conduct with more regularity than Tolstoy. (68)

The most significant aspect of this unhappy Moscow visit was the birth of the creative artist. Tolstoy began to observe closely the life around him and to experience an irresistable urge to describe it on paper. At the fashionable balls and dinner he attended no detail escaped him. He would sit at the window of his bacheleor apartment and watch all the unfolding comedy and tragedy of street life. A policeman strolled by and the observer wondered who he was and what kind of existence he led. A carriage drove past the window and he asked himself who was in it and what the rider was thinking. The house across the street served as a starting point for a guessing game about its inhabitants and all the intimate details of their inner lives. What an interesting book, he imagined could written about such people. (78)

Traveling together is like living together. If the enforced intimacy fails to breed contempt, it makes  travelers inordinately sensitive to each other's slightest fault. (82)

Tolstoy's point was that these men were being hypocritical when they flaunted their convictions. Convictions were invented by the intelligentsia so that they would have something to talk about. (143)