Tolstoy’s Feedback for Dostoevsky
“Just recently I was feeling unwell and read House of the Dead. I had forgotten a good bit, read it over again and I do not know a better book in all our new literature,…
Tag: Leo Tolstoy
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…
Blissful and Blithe
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…
One Way or Another
[Emperor] Alexander II said he did not fear the Liberals because he knew they could all be bought, if not with money, then with honors. –Leo Tolstoy, Writings on Civil Disobedience and Non-Violence
Present Moment, Only Moment: Reminders
Let the soul be happy in the present, and refuse to worry about what will come later.–Horace, Odes You only live once. Keep yourself in the present. The past is gone, and the future is…
So Be It!
“They say: sufferings are misfortunes,” said Pierre. “But if at once, this minute, I was asked, would I remain what I was before I was taken prisoner, or go through it all again, I should…
Liberate Yourself by Examining and Analyzing
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 by Charles E. Moore Title…
Responding to a Pogrom
Violence was much on Tolstoy’s mind. Some eight months before Bryan’s visit a terrible pogrom against the Jews had occurred in Kishinyov. Horrified by this event, Tolstoy readily lent his name to a protest signed…
The Way It Looked in 1908
What you are doing, you do not for the people but for yourselves, to retain the position you occupy, a position you consider advantageous but which is really a most pitiful and abominable one. So …
Like Being in Warsaw in 1941
Merely to know that somewhere, far away, there are men who torture other men by inflicting all sorts of humiliations and inhuman degradations and sufferings on them; and for three months constantly to look on…