Below are quotes that resonate, from Leo Tolstoy’s ‘A Calendar Of Wisdom’.
[1]
A person’s perfection is measured by the extent to which he has liberated himself from his own individual personality. The more he is able to do this, the closer he will be to perfection. – Tolstoy
[2]
All attempts to improve one’s life are fruitless without the idea of sacrifice. Such attempts merely make any improvement impossible. – Tolstoy
[3]
We feel that our most important task on earth is to do something visible: to build a house, plough a field, feed cattle, or pick fruit., whereas it is not so important to work on something invisible, such as one’s ‘soul’; it is just as easy not to do it as to do it. And yet, it is only work of this kind – the work on your ‘soul’, so that you can become better and kinder with each day that passes – which is real and worthwhile; all other work of the visible kind is only useful if our main work is concerned with our ‘souls’. – Tolstoy
[4]
When an angry person gets into a fight or starts hitting someone weaker than himself such as a child or a woman, or even a dog or horse, he is demonstrating his weakness rather than his strength. – Tolstoy
[5]
The Roman sage Seneca said that whenever you feel the onset of anger, the best way to contain it is simply to be quite still and do nothing: don’t walk, or move, or say anything. If you allow your body to do whatever it wants, the anger inside you will simply increase. – Tolstoy
[6]
The person whose anger knows no limits, the person whose anger twines around him like ivy, will shortly find himself in a position in which only his most inveterate enemy would ‘place’ him. – Buddhist saying
[7]
When a small child sees two people having an ill-tempered argument he is not interested in who is right and who is wrong, but runs away from them in sorrow, considering them both equally to blame. And in this he is always more in the right than either of them. – Tolstoy
[8]
Wheresoever the search after truth begins, there life begins; wheresoever that search ceases, there life ceases. – Ruskin, ‘The Deteriorative Power of Conventional Art over Nations’
[9]
There are certain items of knowledge which everybody needs to know. Until people have assimilated such knowledge, all other knowledge will be harmful. – Tolstoy
[10]
Be afraid not of ignorance, but of false knowledge. It is better to know nothing than to consider something that is actually false to be true. – Tolstoy