Tag: Leo Tolstoy

Today’s One-Liner (#301)

Tolstoy and other classic writers deemed it their duty to curse prison, but Solzhenitsyn, who served time in conditions ­those writers could not have begun to imagine, can “say without hesitation: ‘Bless you, prison, for…

A Personal Bible

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…

Today’s One-Liner (#219)

If we would only avoid deceiving ourselves, we would find out what to do, where to go, how to live, and do so with clarity. –Leo Tolstoy, Spiritual Writings, edited Charles E. Moore

So Long Ago and So Modern

St. Francis anticipated all that is most liberal and sympathetic in the modern mood; the love of nature; the love of animals; the sense of social compassion; the sense of the spiritual dangers of prosperity…

Bearing Fruit

Rus­sian lit­er­a­ture might almost be described as the lit­er­a­ture of conversion. (We noted some famous instances in Chapter 3.) Time and again, suffering leads to awareness of Truth or apprehension of God. Tolstoy’s autobiographical Confession recounts…

The Teachings

However little education a man may have, he cannot but know that Christ did not sanction murder, but taught kindness, meekness, forgiveness of injuries, love of one’s enemies—and therefore he cannot help seeing that on…

Start Where We Are

Why exactly is sudden transformation according to a model impossible? The same question can be asked about individuals: why c­an’t someone just become what she admires? Disgusted with her life, Tolstoy’s Kitty, as we have…

Moving toward Perfection

When Turgenev pleaded with him to return to the literary art that had first won him fame, he did not understand that for Tolstoy the measure of true greatness was not what we were but…