The Wisdom of Human Kind

by Leo Tolstoy, Guy De Mallac

Collects the best expressions of human wisdom and organizes them according to topics, such as, faith, God, love, pride, punishment, and vanity

224 pages, Paperback

First published March 1, 1999

About the author

Lev Nikolayevich Tolstoy (Russian: Лев Николаевич Толстой; most appropriately used Liev Tolstoy; commonly Leo Tolstoy in Anglophone countries) was a Russian writer who primarily wrote novels and short stories. Later in life, he also wrote plays and essays. His two most famous works, the novels War and Peace and Anna Karenina, are acknowledged as two of the greatest novels of all time and a pinnacle of realist fiction. Many consider Tolstoy to have been one of the world's greatest novelists. Tolstoy is equally known for his complicated and paradoxical persona and for his extreme moralistic and ascetic views, which he adopted after a moral crisis and spiritual awakening in the 1870s, after which he also became noted as a moral thinker and social reformer.

His literal interpretation of the ethical teachings of Jesus, centering on the Sermon on the Mount, caused him in later life to become a fervent Christian anarchist and anarcho-pacifist. His ideas on nonviolent resistance, expressed in such works as The Kingdom of God Is Within You, were to have a profound impact on such pivotal twentieth-century figures as Mohandas Gandhi and Martin Luther King, Jr.

Reviews

[David]

My copy was translated condensed and introduced by Guy de Mallac, 1999. First appeared in Russia in 1911. Tolstoy disappoints me; he seems very dated, merely a good subject for student debates.
I'd say he treats well such topics as Overindulgence, sexual restraint, freeloading, greed, anger, pride, inequality, vanity, self-denial, Humility, and truthfulness. And his cautions under "Superstitions" seem largely sound:- Superstition of government (not a word about Democracy), False religious practice (constant and everlasting), and False science (out of date, untested, and way out of touch from the past decades). Note also the Initial Editor's Note to chapters on Punishment and The Superstition of Government.
If Douglas were still teaching Philosophy and the History of Religions, this book could have been a useful background to lectures and discussions on many of these topics.