strength

"It was the most pressing work time, when all the peasants show such an extraordinary effort of self-sacrifice in their labour as is not shown in any other conditions of life, and which would be highly valued if the people who show this quality valued it themselves, if it were not repeated every year, and if the results of this effort were not so simple.

To mow and reap rye and oats and cart them, to mow out the meadows, to cross-plough the fallow land, to thresh the seed and sow the winter crops - it all seems simple and ordinary; but to manage to get it all done, it was necessary that all the village people, from oldest to youngest, work ceaselessly during those three or four weeks, three times more than usual, living on kvass, onions and black bread, threshing and transporting the sheaves by night and giving no more than two or three hours a day to sleep. And every year this was done all over Russia."

Leo Tolstoi, Anna Karenina, tr. Pevear and Volokhonsky

Cat Power - Fool

Come along Fool,
a direct hit on your senses, you're disconnected
it's not that it's bad
it's not that it's death
it's just that it's on the tip of your tongue
and you're so silent.

Weber in Tolstoy?

For Sergei Ivanovich his younger brother was a nice fellow with a heart well placed (as he put it in French), but with a mind which, though rather quick, was subject to momentary impressions and therefore filled with contradictions. With the condescension of an older brother, he occasionally explained the meaning of things to him, but could find no pleasure in arguing with him, because he beat him too easily.

Konstantin Levin regarded his brother as a man of great intelligence and education, noble in the highest sense of the word, and endowed with the ability to act for the common good. But, in the depths of his soul, the older he became and the more closely he got to know his brother, the more often it occurred to him that this ability to act for the common good, of which he felt himself completely deprived, was perhaps not a virtue, but on the contrary, a lack of something - not a lack of good, honest and noble desires and tastes, but a lack of life force, of what is known as heart, of that yearning which makes a man choose one out of all the countless paths in life presented to him and desire that one alone. The more he knew his brother, the more he noticed that Sergei Ivanovich and many other workers for the common good had not been brought to this love of the common good by the heart, but had reasoned in their minds that it was good to be concerned with it and were only concerned with it because of that. And Levin was confirmed in this surmise by observing that his brother took questions about the common good and the immortality of the soul no closer to heart than those about a game of chess or the clever construction of a new machine.

Leo Tolstoy, Anna Karenina, tr. Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky