Tag: Leo Tolstoy

Remember to Remember

The following is the conclusion to Leo Tolstoy’s short story “Three Questions”— Remember that there is only one important time and that is now. The present moment is the only time over which we have…

Be a Light

Then coming to this pass [Ryōkan] found only one way to go: he made up his mind, to go his own way, that is to say, to pursue the way of truth—the only way a…

Fading, Vanishing

All the greatest and most important problems of life are fundamentally insoluble… They can never be solved, but only outgrown.  This “outgrowing” proved on further investigation to require a new level of consciousness.  Some higher…

Is This How It Will Be?

Yet we to whom the shortness of life has given frequent occasions of contemplating mortality, can, without emotion, see generations of men pass away, and are at leisure to establish modes of sorrow, and adjust…

Reading the Russians

In this book I portray the Russian tradition as a dialogue of the dead (and a few still living) extending over centuries. Novelists and their characters, critics and ideologists, argue about ultimate questions that obsessed…

Tolstoy/Grossman

[Russian] writers have  decried Russia’s slavery and violent past.—Alexandra Popoff, Vasily Grossman and the Soviet Century Reading [Leo] Tolstoy strengthened [Vasily] Grossman’s ambition to become a writer. Tolstoy’s interest in the human soul, his quest…

Lies

And therefore I think the solution I have found for myself will be valid for all sincere men who set themselves the same question. First of all, to the question: What must we do? I…

Forthwith!

All we can know is, what we, who compose humanity, must do, and what not, in order that the kingdom of God may come. That we all know. And every one need but begin to…

Precepts and Parables

Of all the gospels, the Sermon on the Mount was the portion that impressed me most, and I studied it more often than any other part. Nowhere else does Christ speak with such solemnity; nowhere…