Sublime

For two months I did not read anything else, neither newspapers nor magazines, and I felt so good…. I became more and more astonished by the ignorance, and especially by the cultural, moral ignorance of our society…. All our education should be directed to the accumulation of the cultural heritage of our ancestors, the best thinkers of the world.”

The people soon learned that Ivan was a fool. His wife one day said to him, "The people say you are a fool, Ivan." "Well, let them think so if they wish," he replied.

Tolstoy’s downward spiral came later in life than Mill’s—he was pushing fifty—and it went deeper. “My life came to a standstill,” he writes, “I could breathe, eat, drink and sleep and I could not help breathing, eating, drinking and sleeping; but there was no life in me because I had no desires whose gratification I would have deemed it reasonable

The Way of Life in 1910, the last year of his life. He wished to make the book easily comprehensible for even the simplest and least educated people—peasants and children. Most probably, Tolstoy compared A Calendar of Wisdom to War and Peace when he wrote that “To create a book for the masses, for millions of people … is incomparably more important

‘If you want my opinion concerning that, I’ll tell you that I don’t think there is a drama here. And here’s why. To my mind, love … the two loves that Plato, remember, defines in his Symposium,25 these two loves serve as a touchstone for people.

You thought life dwelt in you alone but I have drawn aside the veil of delusion, and have let you see that by doing evil to others you have done it to yourself also. Life is one in them all, and yours is but a portion of this same common life.