Tolstoy wrote little in 1910 but considerable effort went into completing For Every Day, the compilation of quotations from great authors arranged so as to illustrate the development of his own philosophy of life, a task that he had worked on for three years. With true insight he now began to see “a certain pedantry and dogmatism” in this huge effort, but before he had even finished it he began to rework it in the form of a systematic exposition of his thought on the basis of separate subjects under individual titles. The result was still another compilation, entitled The Path of Life. Obviously these attempts were a poor substitute for the original systematic philosophy that he had long wished to write. But he derived a deep satisfaction in finding that his own convictions on many fundamental problems of life were shared by great thinkers of the past, and he daily read the appropriate passages from the Circle of Reading and For Every Day as though these books were his Bible.
–Ernest J. Simmons, Leo Tolstoy, 729
