Men are ready for tremendous sacrifices, but not for those which life demands of them.
 Leo Tolstoy, The Kingdom of God Is Within You (1894). copy citation

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Author Leo Tolstoy
Source The Kingdom of God Is Within You
Topic sacrifice life
Date 1894
Language English
Reference
Note Translated by Constance Garnett
Weblink http://www.gutenberg.org/cache/epub/4602/pg4602-images.html

Context

“But if you cannot bear to live in everlasting dissonance between your beliefs and your life, thinking one thing and doing another, get out of the mediaeval whited sepulchers, and face your fears. I know very well it is not easy. "It is not a little thing to cut one's self off from all to which a man has been accustomed from his birth, with which he has grown up to maturity. Men are ready for tremendous sacrifices, but not for those which life demands of them. Are they ready to sacrifice modern civilization, their manner of life, their religion, the received conventional morality? "Are we ready to give up all the results we have attained with such effort, results of which we have been boasting for three centuries;” source