Patrícia’s Reviews > Tolstoy > Status Update

“With him anger is calm, and the calm is blazing. Faith has given him new weapons with which to wage, even more implacably, unceasing war upon the lies of modern society. (…) he attacks all the great idols: the hypocrisies of religion, the State, science, art, liberalism, socialism, popular education, benevolence, pacificism. He strikes at all, delivers his desperate attacks upon all.”

“The peace which he finds, the peace of the soul which he invokes, is not the peace of death. It is rather the calm of those burning
worlds which sail by the forces of gravity through the infinite spaces.“

But it is always life that he strains to him, with the violence of a lover. He is "maddened with life." He is "intoxicated with life." He cannot live without this madness. He is drunk at once with happiness and with unhappiness, with death and with immortality.

“On his death-bed he wept, not for himself, but for the unhappy; and he said, in the midst of his sobs: "There are millions of human beings on earth who are suffering: why do you think only of me?”

“The thinker or the artist (…) must decide and must say what will further the welfare of men, what will deliver them from suffering; and he has not decided it, he has not said it; and to-morrow it will perhaps be too late, and he will die....”

“The men who are called to serve others by spiritual work always suffer in the accomplishment of that task; for the spiritual world is brought to birth only in suffering and torture. Sacrifice and suffering; such is the fate of the thinker and the artist, for his fate is the good of men.”

“Leo is always working, by what he tells me. Alas! he is writing religious discussions of some kind. He reads and he ponders until he gives himself the headache, and all this to prove that the Church is not in agreement with the teaching of the Gospel. He will hardly find a dozen people in Russia whom the matter could possibly interest.”

“Reason cannot be defined, and we have no need to define it, for not only do we all know it, but we know nothing else.... All that man knows he knows by means of reason and not by faith.... (…) Then what is the visible life, our individual existence? "It is not our life," says Tolstoy, "for it does not depend upon ourselves.”

“Man is nothing but a reed, the most feeble thing in nature, but he is a thinking reed.... All our dignity resides in thought.... Let us then strive to think well: that is the principle of morality.”

“So he broke loose, and the rupture was the more violent in that for three years he had suppressed his faculty of thought. He walked delicately no longer. Angrily and violently he trampled underfoot the religion which the day before he was still persistently practising. ”