why Tolstoy is the man

'What happiness and peace of mind would be mind if I only could say now, "Lord have mercy upon me!..." But who would I be talking to? Either some indeterminate, inaccessible power, which I cannot have any contact with and cannot even put into words, the great All or Nothing,' he said to himself, 'or else that God sewn up in a little bag like Marie's icon? No. Nothing is certain, nothing but the nothingness of all that we can understand, and the splendor of something we can't understand, but we know to be infinitely important.'

-War and Peace