A man can live and be healthy without killing animals for food; therefore, if he eats meat, he participates in taking animal life merely for the sake of his appetite.
All happy families resemble one another, each unhappy family is unhappy in its own way. All surrounding interests, such as the peace and safety of my family, my property, and myself were based on the law that was rejected by Christ – on the law of a ‘tooth for a tooth.’
All violence consists in some people forcing others, under threat of suffering or death, to do what they do not want to do.
All, everything that I understand, I understand only because I love.
All His first disciples obeyed the same law of the non-resistance of evil [to not return evil for evil], and passed their lives in disability and persecution.And all people live, Not by reason of any care they have for themselves, But by the love for them that is in other people.
And I understood from where my error arose. It arose from my professing Christ in words and denying Him in deed.
And Levin, a happy father and a man in perfect health, was several times so near suicide that he hid the cord, lest he be tempted to hang himself, and was afraid to go out with his gun, for fear of shooting himself. But Levin did not shoot himself, and did not hang himself; he went on living.
Art is not a handicraft, it is the transmission of feeling the artist has experienced.
Art is a human activity having for its purpose the transmission to others of the highest and best feelings to which men have risen.
Boredom: the desire for desires.But the peasants - how do the peasants die?
Christ does not require us to turn the other cheek, and to give away our cloak, in order to make us suffer; but He teaches us not to resist evil [to not return evil for evil], and warns us that doing so may involve personal suffering. Does a father, on seeing his son set out on a long journey, tell him to pass sleepless nights, to eat little, to get wet through, or to freeze? Will he not rather say to him, ‘Go, and if on the road you are cold or hungry, do not be discouraged but go on’?
‘Do not resist evil’ means never to resist evil, i.e., never offer violence to anyone. If a man reviles you, do not revile him in return; suffer, but do no violence. Ecclesiastical teachers told me that the doctrine of Christ was divine, but that its observance was impossible on account of the weakness of human nature.Even in the valley of the shadow of death, two and two do not make six.
Everyone thinks of changing the world, but no one thinks of changing himself.
Faith is the sense of life, that sense by virtue of which man does not destroy himself, but continues to live on. It is the force whereby we live.Government is an association of men who do violence to the rest of us.
He never chooses an opinion; he just wears whatever happens to be in style.
Historians are like deaf people who go on answering questions that no one has asked them.
Hypocrisy in anything whatever may deceive the cleverest and most penetrating man, but the least wide-awake of children recognizes it, and is revolted by it, however ingeniously it may be disguised.
I did not carry out that teaching in deed [to not return evil for evil], for I admitted and respected the unchristian institutions that surrounded me.
I did not see that it was impossible to admit the Godhead of Christ – the basis of whose teaching is non-resistance of evil – and, at the same time, to work consciously and calmly for the institutions of property, courts of law, kingdoms, the army, and so on.
I imbibed such a notion of the practical impossibility of following the divine doctrine gradually and almost imperceptibly. I was so accustomed to it, it coincided so well with all my animal feelings, that I had never observed the contradiction in which I lived.
I sit on a man's back, choking him and making him carry me, and yet assure myself and others that I am very sorry for him and wish to ease his lot by all possible means - except by getting off his back.
I was taught from my childhood that Christ is God and that His teaching is divine and authoritative; while, on the other hand, I was also told to respect those institutions that, by means of violence, secured my safety from evil; I was taught to honor those institutions as being sacred. I was taught to resist evil; and it was instilled into me that it was humiliating and dishonorable to submit to evil and to suffer from it; and that it was praiseworthy to resist evil. I was taught to condemn and to execute. I was taught to make war, i.e., to resist evil by murder. The army, a member of which I was, was called a ‘Christ-loving’[1] army, and the Church consecrated its mission. I was taught to resist an offender by violence and to avenge a private insult, or one against my native land, by violence. All this was never regarded as wrong, but, on the contrary, I was told that it was perfectly right and in no way contrary to Christ’s doctrine.
If a man were to set all the faculties of his mind to the annulling of a given law, what more forcible argument could he use for its suppression than that it was an impracticable law, and that the legislator’s own opinion of it was that it could not be kept without supernatural aid? And yet, this was exactly what I had thought about the commandment ‘not to resist evil.’ I tried to remember when and how the strange idea had first come into my mind, that the doctrine of Christ was divine in authority but impossible in practice. On reviewing my past life, I discovered that this idea had never been transmitted to me in all its nakedness, for then it would have repelled me; but that I had imperceptibly imbibed it from my earliest childhood, and that the associations of my life had confirmed some strange error.
If so many men, so many minds, certainly so many hearts, so many kinds of love.
If there existed no external means for dimming their consciences, one-half of the men would at once shoot themselves, because to live contrary to one's reason is a most intolerable state, and all men of our time are in such a state.If you want to be happy, be.
If you deal carelessly with bees you will injure them,and will yourself be injured. And so with men. It cannot be otherwise, because natural love is the fundamental law of human life.In all history there is no war which was not hatched by the governments, the governments alone, independent of the interests of the people, to whom war is always pernicious even when successful.
In the name of God, stop a moment, cease your work, look around you.
It did not then occur to me, as it does now, that it would be much simpler to regulate our lives according to the doctrine of Christ; and then, if courts of law, executions, and war were found to be indispensably necessary for our welfare, we might pray to have them too.
It is amazing how complete is the delusion that beauty is goodness.
It was only after losing all faith in the explanations of learned theology and criticism, and after laying them all aside in obedience to the words of Christ (Mark 10:15), that I began to understand what had until then seemed incomprehensible to me. It was not by deep thought, or by skillfully comparing or commenting on the texts of the gospel, that I came to understand the doctrine. On the contrary, all grew clear to me for the very reason that I had ceased to rest on mere interpretations.
Judgment sins by punishing for crime, and all judgment is annihilated by the law of God – mercy.
Love is God, and to die means that I, a particle of love, shall return to the general and eternal source.Love is invincible.Love is life. All, everything that I understand, I understand only because I love. Everything is, everything exists, only because I love. Everything is united by it alone. Love is God, and to die means that I, a particle of love, shall return to the general and eternal source.
Love is the unity of soulsMan lives consciously for himself, but is
an unconscious instrument in the attainment of the historic, universal, aims of humanity.Music is the shorthand of emotion.
My faith in these ‘toga,’ in these empty idols, hid the truth from my eyes. In my way to Him these ‘toga,’ which I did not have the strength to renounce, stood before me, obscuring His light.
Nietzsche was stupid and abnormal.
One of the first conditions of happiness is that the link between Man and Nature shall not be broken.Our body is a machine for living. It is organized for that, it is its nature. Let life go on in it unhindered and let it defend itself.
The changes in our life must come from the impossibility to live otherwise than according to the demands of our conscience not from our mental resolution to try a new form of life.
The chief difference between words and deeds is that words are always intended for men for their approbation, but deeds can be done only for God.
The greater the state, the more wrong and cruel its patriotism, and the greater is the sum of suffering upon which its power is founded.The vocation of every man and woman is to serve other people. The law condemns and punishes only actions within certain definite and narrow limits; it thereby justifies, in a way, all similar actions that lie outside those limits.
The law of God - mercy.
The only significance of life consists in helping to establish the kingdom of God; and this can be done only by means of the acknowledgment and profession of the truth by each one of us.
The sole meaning of life is to serve humanity.The two most powerful warriors are patience and time.
The vocation of every man and woman is to serve other people. There is no greatness where there is no simplicity, goodness and truth.To say that a work of art is good, but incomprehensible to the majority of men, is the same as saying of some kind of food that it is very good but that most people can't eat it.True life is lived when tiny changes occur.
Truth is communicated to men only by deeds of truth. Truth, like gold, is to be obtained not by its growth, but by washing away from it all that is not gold.War is so unjust and ugly that all who wage it must try to stifle the voice of conscience within themselves.War on the other hand is such a terrible thing, that no man, especially a Christian man, has the right to assume the responsibility of starting it.
We lost because we told ourselves we lost.
We must not only cease our present desire for the growth of the state, but we must desire its decrease, its weakening.
We were taught that it was possible to be a Christian without fulfilling His law not to resist evil.
What a strange illusion it is to suppose that beauty is goodness.What an immense mass of evil must result... from allowing men to assume the right of anticipating what may happen.
Why should Christ have given to us such clear and good precepts, applicable to us all, if He knew beforehand that the keeping of them was impossible by man in his own unaided strength?
Without knowing what I am and why I am here, life is impossible.
