What a strange illusion it is to suppose that beauty is goodness.--Leo Tolstoy (1828-1910)
The more is given the less people will work for themselves, and the less they work the more their poverty will increase.-Leo Tolstoy,"Help for the Starving, Part II" January, 1892
Would reason ever have proved to me that I must love my neighbour instead of strangling him? I was told that in my childhood and I believed it gladly, for they told me what was already in my soul. But who discovered it? Not reason. Reason discovered the struggle for existence, and the law demanding that I should strangle all who hinder the satisfaction of my desires. That is the deduction of reason. But loving one's neighbour reason could never discover, because it's unreasonable.-- Leo Tolstoy, Anna Karenina
It is by those who have suffered that the world has been advanced. Leo Tolstoy
Truth, like gold, is to be obtained not by its growth, but by washing away from it all that is not gold. -- Leo Tolstoy
The creation and sale of most art today is pure prostitution. The comparison is true in every detail. Real art can only rarely be created even by a real artist; like a child in a mother's womb, it is the ripened fruit of his prior life. False art, though, can be ceaselessly produced by craftsmen, according to the dictates of a market. Like a faithful wife who loves her husband, real art does not need any excess decoration; like a prostitute, false art demands to be decorated. True art comes out of an artist's urgent need to express the feelings that have formed inside him, just as a mother needs to give birth to her baby. False art answers only to profit. Real art brings new feelings into our life, as a woman brings a new person into the world. False art corrupts; it makes a person dissipated, distracts him, weakens his spiritual power. Everyone must understand this, in order that they shun the terrible proliferation of this dirty, dissipated type of art which is, on its face, prostitution.--Leo Tolstoy, "A Calendar of Wisdom"
The problem of the meaning of life is intractable, but life's purpose becomes very simple when we ask ourselves what we should do. -Tolstoy
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