Leo Tolstoy

“ Moreover, I have become convinced by experience that there is nothing more pernicious for the development of a child than this kind of single questioning which springs from the teacher's relation of superiority to the pupil; and for me there is nothing more disturbing than such a spectacle. A grown man tortures a child without the slightest authority. The teacher knows that the pupil is tortured as he stands blushing and perspiring before him. The teacher himself finds it wearisome and difficult, but he has a rule, in accordance with which he must accustom his pupil to speak alone. ”

“ All beings love themselves more than they love us, and happiness is impossible. There are men—and the number of them is increasing every day—who cannot solve this difficulty, and who kill themselves, declaring that life is an empty and stupid jest. But in the meantime the solution of the riddle is more than simple, and offers itself. I can be happy only in a worldly order where all beings should love others more than themselves. The whole world would be happy if all beings loved, not themselves, but their fellows.
I am a being, a man, and reason gives me the law of universal well-being. ”

“ Who will take and protect the child? Who will spend sleepless nights watching with sick, ill-smelling children, unless it be the mother? Nature made a protective armor for the child in the mother's love; they take it away, giving nothing in its place. Who will educate the boy? Who will penetrate into his soul, if not his father? Who will ward off danger? All this is put aside! All life that is the perpetuation of the human race is put aside."
"That seems correct," said Julius, carried away by the physician's eloquence. ”

“ There is noticeable a general distaste for mathematics and analysis, and a taste for singing and reading, and especially for stories.—"What is the good of mathematics and writing? tell us about geography, or even history, and we will listen!" they say.
By eight o'clock eyes begin to grow weary; yawns become frequent; the lights burn more dimly; they snuff the candles less frequently than before; the older scholars hold out, but the younger ones, leaning their elbows on the table, fall asleep lulled by the pleasant sound of the teacher's voice. ”

“ When I listen to you I cannot help yielding to the beauty of the life which you describe for me; but as I think it over, I see that it is all deception, leading to savagery, brutality, of life approaching that of brutes."
"Wherein do you see this savagery?"
"In this: that as you subject your own lives to labors, you have no leisure or chance to occupy yourselves with arts and sciences. Here you are in ragged dress, with hardened hands and feet; your fair friend, who might be a goddess of beauty, is like a slave. ”

“ During the night the hoar-frost had fallen; there was frost on the branches, and frost on my shuba, and Demyan was all covered by frost, and the air was full of falling hoar-frost.
I awakened Demyan. We got up on our snow-shoes and started on our way. It was silent in the forest. The only sound was what we made gliding over the soft snow, and the occasional cracking of a tree under the frost, and the echo of it dying away through the aisles.
Once only some living creature rustled out from under our feet, and scurried away. I immediately thought it might be the bear. ”

“ It is for us to end it if we only understand that for every one of us the drinking or non-drinking of wine is not a matter of indifference; that with every bottle of wine bought, every glass of wine imbibed, we are serving that terrible devilish deed whereby the best strength of humanity is wasted; but, on the other hand, by refraining from wine for ourselves, and by doing away with the senseless custom of using wine at festivals, weddings, and christenings, we are performing a work of the utmost importance—our soul's work, God's work. ”

“ Thomas More could not imagine even a Utopia without slavery. So also men of the beginning of this century could not imagine the life of man without war. Only after the Napoleonic wars was the idea clearly expressed that man can live without war. And now a hundred years have gone since the first clear expression of the idea that mankind can live without slavery; and there is no longer slavery in Christian nations. And there shall not pass away another hundred years after the clear utterance of the idea that mankind can live without war, before war shall cease to be. ”

“ In order that the pupil may wholly surrender himself to the teacher, there must be opened before him one corner of that curtain which hides from him all the charm of that world of thought, knowledge, and poetry into which education is to lead him. Only when the pupil finds himself under the constant charm of this light gleaming before him will he be in a condition to work over himself as we require him to do.
What means have we for lifting before our pupils this corner of the curtain? ”

“ If patriotism be good, then Christianity, as giving peace, is an idle dream, and the sooner we root it out, the better. But if Christianity really gives peace, and if we really want peace, then patriotism is a survival of barbarism, and it is not only wrong to excite and develop it, as we do now, but it ought to be rooted out by every means, by preaching, persuasion, contempt, ridicule. If Christianity be truth, and we wish to live in peace, then must we more than cease to take pleasure in the power of our country ”

“ In the quiet of a village solitude the same passions will torment you—only a hundred times more violently. The fraud of the Christians, or their mistake—for I don't care to judge them—consists simply in this,—that they don't wish to understand the nature of man. The only person who can perfectly carry out their teachings is an old man who has outlived all his passions. A man in his prime, or a youth like you who has not yet learned life or himself, cannot submit to their law, because this law has for its basis, not the nature of man, but an idle philosophy. ”

“ And it makes no difference to us what men say about us. We are not doing this in the eyes of men, but because in this alone do we see life and welfare."
"It is impossible not to live for self," said Julius. "The gods instilled in us our instinct to love ourselves better than others and to seek happiness for ourselves. And you do the same thing. You confess that some of you have pity on yourselves ; more and more they will look out for their own pleasures, and be ever more willing to give up your faith and do just what we are doing." ”

“ In Christianity, the whole fraud is built up on the fantastic conception of a Church; a conception founded on nothing, and which as soon as we begin to study Christianity amazes us by its unexpected and useless absurdity.
Of all the godless ideas and words there is none more godless than that of a Church. There is no idea which has produced more evil, none more inimical to Christ's teaching, than the idea of a Church. ”

“ I cannot compel a man to alter his religion either by violence or by cunning or by fraud—false miracles.
His religion is his life. How can I take from him his religion and give him another? It is like taking out his heart and putting another in its place. I can only do that if his religion and mine are words, and are not what gives him life; if it is a wart and not a heart. Such a thing is impossible also, because no man can deceive or compel another to believe what he does not believe ”

“ Dreadful and difficult as is the position of a man living the Christian life, amidst lives of violence, he has no path but that of struggle and sacrifice and sacrifice till the end.
One must realize the gulf that separates the lousy, famished millions from the overfed people who trim their dresses with lace; and to fill it up we need sacrifices, and not the hypocrisy with which we now try to hide from ourselves the depth of the gulf.
A man may lack the strength to throw himself into the gulf, but it cannot be escaped by any man who seeks after life. ”

“ Goodness and beauty for humanity is what unites men. Thus if the partizans of science and art actually have in view the good of humanity, they ought to advance only such sciences and such arts as lead to these ends; and if this were so, there would not be so many sciences, the aim of which is the advantage only of a few societies and the injury of others. If good were actually the aim of arts and sciences, never would the investigations of the positive sciences, since they often have no relation to the true advantage of mankind, attain such an inexplicable importance. ”

“ If to-day the Dukhobors in the Caucasus should yield, being unable any longer to bear the sufferings which overcome their old men and women, their wives and children, still, to-morrow, there would arise other contenders, ready on all hands, more and more boldly proclaiming their principles, and less and less liable to yield. Does truth cease to be truth because the men who professed it become weak under the pressure of torture? That which is of God must conquer that which is of man.
"But what will happen if government is brought to an end?" ”

“ The peasants were shouting on all sides; but on my right, not far from where my comrade stood, I heard a woman screaming at the top of her voice:—
"Here he is! here he is! here he is! This way! this way! oï! oï! aï! aï! aï!"
Evidently she saw the bear. I no longer had any expectations of its coming my way, so I fixed my eyes on my comrade. I saw Demyan, with a cudgel, and not wearing his snow-shoes, running along the trodden path toward my comrade, crouching down behind him, and calling his attention to something, as if he were urging him to fire. ”

“ If, two thousand years ago, at the time of the Roman Empire, even at the time of Charles V., or even before the Revolution and the Napoleonic wars, it was possible not to see the vanity, I will even say the absurdity, of attempting to insure personal happiness, the welfare of the family, the nation, or the State, by struggling against all who seek the same thing,—that illusion has now become absolutely impossible to any man who will pause in his work, be it only for a moment, and reflect upon what he is, upon the state of the world about him, and upon what he ought to be. ”

“ This same child of the people, every child of the people, has precisely similar rights—what am I saying? has greater rights to the enjoyment of art than we, the children of the fortunate class, who are not reduced to the necessity of this ceaseless work, and who are surrounded by all the amenities of life.
To deprive him of the right of enjoying art, to deprive me, his teacher, of the right of leading him into that domain of the best enjoyments for which his whole being yearns with all the powers of his soul, is a still greater absurdity. ”

“ Shall I form part of a government which recognizes the right to own landed property by men who never work on it, which levies taxes on the poor in order to give them to the rich, which condemns erring men to gallows and death, which sends out soldiers to commit murder, which depraves whole races of men by means of opium and brandy, etc., or shall I refuse to take a share in a government, the doings of which are contrary to my conscience? ”

“ Let the people of our Christian society pause in their work and reflect for a moment on the state of their lives, and involuntarily they will be led to accept the conception of life given by Christianity; a conception so natural, so simple, and answering so completely the needs of the heart and mind of humanity, that it would arise almost spontaneously in the understanding of any one willing to liberate himself, were it but for a moment, from the entanglement in which he is held by the complications of his own work and the work of others. ”

“ How bring about the accomplishment of evangelical teaching? Ought I not to defend people if they ask me for help, even if it came about that they must be freed by violence, if before my eyes people are beaten and killed? To defend and free people by violence is not necessary, because this is impossible, and because to try to do good by violence, that is by wrong, is stupid. ”

“ Never, it seems to me, have men lived in such evident contradiction between the demands of conscience and their acts.
The humanity of our time is, as it were, fastened to something. It is as if some external cause prevented it from taking that position which is natural to it according to its conscience. And this cause—if not the only one, at least the principal one—is the physical condition of stupefaction in which, by wine or tobacco, the immense majority of the men of our time bring themselves. ”

“ If you are a young man who have never as yet taken liquor, never as yet been poisoned by the poison of wine, treasure your innocence and freedom from temptation. If you taste, the temptation will be all the harder for you to overcome it. And do not believe that wine will increase your gaiety. At your time of life gaiety is natural, genuine, good gaiety; and wine only changes your true, innocent gaiety into a drunken, senseless, vicious gaiety. ”

“ As to the hackneyed paradox, heard till it has become insipid, that for the comprehension of the beautiful a certain preparation is needed—who said it, and what proof is of it? It is only an expedient, a loophole from an untenable position, into which we have been led by the falsity of our tendency and the exclusive adoption of our art by one class. Why is the beauty of the sun, the beauty of a human face, the beauty of the sounds of a popular melody, the beauty of an act of love and sacrifice, accessible to every one, and why do these things require no preparation? ”