classics digests, reflections and reviews
At the edge of the road stood an oak. Probably ten times the age of the birches that formed the forest, ten times as thick and twice as tall as they. It was an enormous tree, its girth twice as great as a man could embrace, and some of its branches had been broken off and its bark scarred. With its huge ungainly limbs sprawling unsymmetrically, and its gnarled hands […]
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As a great humanist and artist, Tolstoy was deeply aware of and sympathetic to the prevailing feelings of the common people, although he was an eminent member of the Russian aristocracy. In these essays written between 1890 and 1910, the year of his death, the constant theme is the struggle between his conscience and pacifist convictions, and the society of violence from which he could not extricate himself, and for […]
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What is Time Time is merely a device by means of which we gradually see that which is in reality and which is ever the same. In order that the eye may see the entire globe, the latter must turn before the observing eye. Even the world revolves before the eyes of men in time. Time and space is the disintegration of the infinite for the convenience of finite creatures. […]
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When men accept as indubitable truths that which is offered to them as such by others, without stopping to examine it by the exercise of their reason, they fall into superstition. Such is our modern superstition of science, namely recognition as indubitable truths of what is passed as truth by professors, academicians and men calling themselves scientists in general…people who in a given period usurp the right of determining what […]
Read more“Only he who does not believe in God can believe that men, who are of his own kind, may order his life so as to make it better.” “Men see that there is something wrong with their life and endeavor in some way to improve it…But to improve oneself, one must first admit that one lacks goodness, and this is annoying. And they turn all their attention away from that […]
Read moreA story of Tolstoy was related by Prof. Irwin Weil [1]: A young Jewish man wrote to Tolstoy a few months before the latter died, and asked how a Jew could believe his teachings which were based on the words of Jesus Christ. Tolstoy replied, “The words of Christ are not important and applicable because they were said by Christ, on the contrary, they were said by Christ because they […]
Read more[Posted to commemorate the 106th anniversary of Tolstoy’s death] Who Am I? A man who has attained old age has passed through many vicissitudes : he was first an infant, then a child, an adult, an old man. But no matter how he has changed, he always calls himself “I”. This “I” was the same in his infancy, in his period of maturity, in his old age. This unchanging “I” we […]
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