Leo Tolstoy: Trending quotes (page 20)

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“Division of labor is a justification for sloth.”

Leo Tolstoy

Source: Path of Life (1909), p. 79

“Nekhludoff recalled his relations with the wife of the district commander, and a flood of shameful recollections came upon him. “There is a disgusting bestiality in man,” he thought; “but when it is in a primitive state, one looks down upon and despises it, whether he is carried away with or withstands it. But when this same bestiality hides itself under a so-called aesthetic, poetic cover, and demands to be worshiped, then, deifying the beast, one gives himself up to it, without distinguishing between the good and the bad. Then it is horrible.””

Leo Tolstoy book Resurrection

Source: Resurrection (1899), Ch. 73

“It is often better for a person to recognize a sin than to do a good deed. Recognizing a sin makes a person humble. Doing a good deed often can feed a person’s pride.”

Leo Tolstoy

Source: Path of Life (1909), p. 108

Personality

“The Churches as Churches—as institutions affirming their own infallibility—are anti-Christian institutions. Between the Churches as such and Christianity, not only is there nothing in common except the name, but they are two quite opposite and opposing principles. The one represents pride, violence, self-assertion, immobility and death: the other humility, penitence, meekness, progress, and life.”

Leo Tolstoy

The Kingdom of God is Within You (1894)

Life , Death

“Service of the people by sciences and arts will only exist when men live with the people and as the people live, and without presenting any claims will offer their scientific and artistic services, which the people will be free to accept or decline as they please.”

Leo Tolstoy

What then must we do? (1886)

Men , People , Art , Science

“Every one who has a heart and eyes sees that you, working men, are obliged to pass your lives in want and in hard labor, which is useless to you, while other men, who do not work, enjoy the fruits of your labor—that you are the slaves of these men, and that this ought not to exist.”

Leo Tolstoy

"To the Working People," Complete Works, trans. Leo Wiener, Vol 24, p. 129 (1905)

Men , Heart

“The unhappiness of our life; patch up our false way of life as we will, propping it up by the aid of the sciences and arts - that life becomes feebler, sicklier, and more tormenting every year; every year the number of suicides and the avoidance of motherhood increases; every year the people of that class become feebler; every year we feel the increasing gloom of our lives. Evidently salvation is not to be found by increasing the comforts and pleasures of life, medical treatments, artificial teeth and hair, breathing exercises, massage, and so forth;…It is impossible to remedy this by any amusements, comforts, or powders - it can only be remedied by a change of life.”

Leo Tolstoy

What then must we do? (1886)

Life , People , Pleasure , Art

“Vengeance is mine; I will repay.”

Leo Tolstoy book Anna Karenina

Epigraph
Anna Karenina (1875–1877; 1878)

“When the woman showed her love for the children that were not her own, and wept over them, I saw in her the living God, and understood What men live by.”

Leo Tolstoy book What Men Live By

Source: What Men Live By (1881), Ch. XI

Love , Men , God , Children

“My reason will still not understand why I pray, but I shall still pray, and my life, my whole life, independently of anything that may happen to me, is every moment of it no longer meaningless as it was before, but has an unquestionable meaning of goodness with which I have the power to invest it.”

Leo Tolstoy book Anna Karenina

Pt. VIII, ch. 19
Anna Karenina (1875–1877; 1878)

Life , Understanding

“When a person inflates his own importance, he does not see his own sins; and his sins get bigger right along with him.”

Leo Tolstoy

Source: Path of Life (1909), p. 108

Personality

“After Plotinus, says Schassler, fifteen centuries passed without the slightest scientific interest for the world of beauty and art. …In reality, nothing of the kind happened. The science of aesthetics … neither did nor could vanish, because it never existed. … the Greeks were so little developed that goodness and beauty seemed to coincide. On that obsolete Greek view of life the science of aesthetics was invented by men of the eighteenth century, and especially shaped and mounted in Baumgarten's theory. The Greeks (as anyone may read in Bénard's book on Aristotle and Walter's work on Plato) never had a science of aesthetics.”

Leo Tolstoy

What is Art? (1897)

Life , Men , Books , World

“In spite the mountains of books written about art, no precise definition of art has been constructed. And the reason for this is that the conception of art has been based on the conception of beauty.”

Leo Tolstoy

What is Art? (1897)

Books , Beauty , Art , Mountain

“When a person is haughty, he distances himself from other people and thereby deprives himself of one of life’s biggest pleasures—open, joyful communication with everyone.”

Leo Tolstoy

Source: Path of Life (1909), p. 108

Life , People , Pleasure , Communication

“In the spiritual realm nothing is indifferent: what is not useful is harmful.”

Leo Tolstoy A Letter to a Hindu

Source: A Letter to a Hindu (1908), VII

Indifference

“There is no single speech nor article in which it is not said that the purpose of all these orgies is the peace of Europe. At a dinner given by the representatives of French literature, all breathe of peace. M. Zola, who, a short time previously, had written that war was inevitable, and even serviceable; M. de Vogue, who more than once has stated the same in print, say, neither of them, a word as to war, but speak only of peace. The sessions of Parliament open with speeches upon the past festivities; the speakers mention that such festivities are an assurance of peace to Europe.
It is as if a man should come into a peaceful company, and commence energetically to assure everyone present that he has not the least intention to knock out anyone's teeth, blacken their eyes, or break their arms, but has only the most peaceful ideas for passing the evening.”

Leo Tolstoy

Source: Patriotism and Christianity http://en.wikisource.org/wiki/Patriotism_and_Christianity (1896), Ch. 1

War , Peace , Literature , Idea

“I know that my unity with all people cannot be destroyed by national boundaries and government orders.”

Leo Tolstoy

My Religion (1884), as translated in The Human Experience : Contemporary American and Soviet Fiction and Poetry (1989) by the Quaker US/USSR Committee

People

“Armies are necessary, before all things, for the defense of governments from their own oppressed and enslaved subjects.”

Leo Tolstoy

The Kingdom of God is Within You (1894)

“The relation of word to thought, and the creation of new concepts is a complex, delicate and enigmatic process unfolding in our soul.”

Leo Tolstoy

Pegagogicheskie Statli (Pedagogical Writings), pg. 143.
Pedagogical Writings (1903)

Soul

“For us, with the rule of right and wrong given us by Christ, there is nothing for which we have no standard. And there is no greatness where there is not simplicity, goodness, and truth.”

Leo Tolstoy book War and Peace

Bk. XIV, ch. 18
War and Peace (1865–1867; 1869)

Truth , Christ