The sufferings of the whole of humanity, and of individuals, are not useless, but lead humanity, though indirectly, ever to the one activity appointed for men: that of perfecting themselves. Leo Tolstoy (1828 – 1910)

The sufferings of the whole of humanity, and of individuals, are not useless, but lead humanity, though indirectly, ever to the one activity appointed for men: that of perfecting themselves. Leo Tolstoy (1828 – 1910)
Why do I strive, why do I toil in this narrow, confined frame, when life, all life with all its joys, is open to me? Leo Tolstoy (1828 – 1910)
I have often been irritated, though it would be comic if the consequences were not so awful, by observing how men shut one another in a delusion and cannot get out of this magic circle. Leo Tolstoy (1828 – 1910)
Everyone, and especially the young, should understand that to devote your lives, or even to occupy yourselves with arranging by violence the lives of others according to your own ideas, is not only a crude superstition, but is an evil, criminal business, pernicious to the soul. Understand that the desire of an enlightened human soul for the good of others, […]
Let a man but realize that the aim of his life is the fulfillment of God’s law, and that law will replace all other laws for him, and he will give it his sole allegiance, so that by that very allegiance every human law will lose all binding and controlling power in his eyes. Leo Tolstoy (1828 – 1910)
We only fail to see the fact that the life we lead is discordant with human nature, because all those horrors among which we quietly live, have come about so gradually that we have not noticed them. Leo Tolstoy (1828 – 1910)
Instead of every man directing his energies to freeing himself, to transforming his conception of life, people seek for an external united method of gaining freedom, and continue to rivet their chains faster and faster. Leo Tolstoy (1828 – 1910)
By faith it appears that in order to understand the meaning of life I must renounce my reason, the very thing for which alone a meaning is required. Leo Tolstoy (1828 – 1910)
We are enslaved by the laws we set up for our protection, which have become our oppression. Leo Tolstoy (1828 – 1910)
Human life changes not from the alteration of external forms, but only from the internal work of each man upon himself. Leo Tolstoy (1828 – 1910)