“In many of his biographical writings Tolstoy makes clear that, in pursuit of a virtuous life, he had to struggle hard with his own nature, habits, and animal passions, and had to overcome early training and education; but in this drama he shows that, in attempting to be a Christian, he had to battle constantly, often bitterly, with his own family, with the Church, and with all the social, economic, and political conditions and institutions that surrounded him.”

Source: Why We Fail as Christians (1919), p. 42

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Robert Hunter (author)98

American sociologist, author, golf course architect 1874–1942

Bernard Groethuysen (1880–1946) French literary historian, translator and writer

Source: The Bourgeois: Catholicism vs. Capitalism in Eighteenth-Century France (1927), p. 25

“But how to write about a man who lived such a contemplative life marked by so few striking external events? He was extraordinarily private, and he kept his own person invisible in his writing. I had none of the material that ordinarily lends itself to narrative—no family dramas, no love affairs, jealousies, curious anecdotes, feuds, spats, or reunions. He had a large correspondence, but after his death his colleagues followed his instructions and removed almost all personal comments from his letters. No, not much external drama in his life: most scholars regard Spinoza as a placid and gentle soul—some compare his life to that of Christian saints, some even to Jesus.”

Baruch Spinoza (1632–1677) Dutch philosopher

Irvin D. Yalom, in his novel The Spinoza Problem, prologue. (New York: Basic Books, 2012)
S - Z

“Nothing, then, would prevent him henceforth from living his life, a purely secular life, according to his nature and his habits, without having to ask himself at every moment whether what he had done was displeasing to God or not. And since he was no longer the sinner whose life, as soon as he acted by his own powers, was but sin, he would be able to enumerate separately the sins which he had committed on a particular occasion.”

Bernard Groethuysen (1880–1946) French literary historian, translator and writer

Source: The Bourgeois: Catholicism vs. Capitalism in Eighteenth-Century France (1927), p. 120

“It occurred to him that what had appeared perfectly impossible before, namely that he had not spent his life as he should have done, might after all be true. It occurred to him that his scarcely perceptible attempts to struggle against what was considered good by the most highly placed people, those scarcely noticeable impulses which he had immediately suppressed, might have been the real thing, and all the rest false. And his professional duties and the whole arrangement of his life and of his family, and all his social and official interests, might all have been false. He tried to defend all those things to himself and suddenly felt the weakness of what he was defending.”

Leo Tolstoy The Death of Ivan Ilyich

Source: The Death of Ivan Ilyich (1886), Ch. XI

“All his life he had lived by the law. Often his job had been to stop acts of revenge…. And now revenge was all that life had left for him.”

Vernor Vinge A Fire Upon the Deep (1st edition)

Source: A Fire Upon the Deep (1992), Chapter 33 (p. 428).

“…he was indebted to his right honourable friend [Edmund Burke] for the greatest share of the political knowledge he possessed,—his political education had been formed under him,—his instructions had invariably governed his principles.”

Charles James Fox (1749–1806) British Whig statesman

Speech in the House of Commons (2 March 1790).
1790s

“The aim of a student’s life should be to overcome any illusions or prejudices he may have and to give up mean habits. He should, and it is his duty to, propagate education among his illiterate brothers and to consider the propagation of education as part of his own education. He ought to acquire knowledge for the sake of knowledge and he should not be unaware of the needs of life.”

Zakir Hussain (politician) (1897–1969) 3rd President of India

In his first school essay, while in Class VIII, expressing his ideas and ideals, in: p. 28.
Quest for Truth (1999)

“He realized that Florentine personified this kind of wretched life against which his whole being was in revolt. And in the same moment he understood the feeling that drew him toward her: she was his own poverty, his solitude, his sad childhood, his lonely youth. She was all that he had hated, all that he had left behind him, but also everything that remained intimately linked to him, the most profound part of his nature and the powerful spur of his destiny.”

Gabrielle Roy book The Tin Flute

P 205
The Tin Flute (1945)

“When man is raised from his slumber in the senses, he feels that he is a man, he surveys his surroundings, and finds that he is in a state. He was introduced into this state, by the power of circumstances, before he could freely select his own position. But as a moral being he cannot possibly rest satisfied with a political condition forced upon him by necessity, and only calculated for that condition; and it would be unfortunate if this did satisfy him. In many cases man shakes off this blind law of necessity, by his free spontaneous action, of which among many others we have an instance, in his ennobling by beauty and suppressing by moral influence the powerful impulse implanted in him by nature in the passion of love.”

Friedrich Schiller book On the Aesthetic Education of Man

Letter 3
On the Aesthetic Education of Man (1794)

“He was so excessively polite that Wallendar suspected he had endured many humiliations in his life.”

Henning Mankell book The Dogs of Riga

Source: The Dogs of Riga

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Robert Hunter (author)98

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