Leo tolstoy quotes on love
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Leo Tolstoy on Love and Its Paradoxical Demands
Leo Tolstoy (September 9, 1828–November 10, 1910) began tussling with the grandest questions of existence from an early age. As a young man, he struggled through his search for himself, learned the hard way about the moral weight of immoral motives, and confronted the meaning of human existence. By late middle age, his work had gained him worldwide literary acclaim, but had also managed to antagonize both church and state at home — the Russian government found his social, political, and moral views so worrisome that they censored him heavily and threatened imprisonment, while the Orthodox Church was so offended by his spiritual writings that they eventually excommunicated him.
What his homeland withheld the world gave and gave heartily — especially England, where a small but spirited Tolstoy fan base had mushroomed. The author’s devoted secretary and supporter, Vladimir Chertkov, who had landed in Lon
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Leo Tolstoy Quotes
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“She hardly knew at times what it was she feared, and what she hoped for. Whether she feared or desired what had happened or what was going to happen and exactly what she longed for, she could not have said.”
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“He was angry with all of them for their interference just because he felt in his soul that they, all these people, were right. He felt that the love that bound him to Anna was not a momentary impulse, which would resehandling, as worldly intrigues do pass, leaving no other traces in the life of either but pleasant or unpleasant memories. He felt all the tortyr of his own and her position, all the difficulty there was for them, conspicuous as they were in the eye of all the world, in concealing their love, in lying and deceiving; and in lying, deceiving, feigning, and continually thinking of others, when the passion that united them was so intense that they were both oblivious of everything else but their love.”
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“No, no, reconciliation is inom
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Leo Tolstoy on Kindness and the Measure of Love
“Practice kindness all day to everybody and you will realize you’re already in heaven now,” Jack Kerouac wrote in a beautiful letter to his first wife and lifelong friend. Somehow, despite our sincerest intentions, we repeatedly fall short of this earthly divinity, so readily available yet so easily elusive. And yet in our culture, it has been aptly observed, “we are never as kind as we want to be, but nothing outrages us more than people being unkind to us.” In his stirring Syracuse commencement address, George Saunders confessed with unsentimental ruefulness: “What I regret most in my life are failures of kindness.” I doubt any decent person, upon candid reflection, would rank any other species of regret higher. To be human is to leap toward our highest moral potentialities, only to trip over the foibled actualities of our reflexive patterns. To be a good human is to keep leaping anyway.
In the middle of his fifty-fi