An open library of thought
Seek a meaning that death cannot undo, and refuse violence.
Following Matthew 5:39, Tolstoy holds that evil must never be answered with violence, because coercion reproduces the evil it claims to suppress; the principle condemns war, criminal courts and the death penalty alike.
Refusing military service, as many Doukhobors did, rather than taking up arms against an enemy or a rebel.
Art is the activity by which a person consciously hands on, through external signs, a feeling he has lived through, so that others are infected by it; its worth depends on the sincerity of the transmission and on the feeling transmitted.
A boy who recounts his meeting with a wolf so that his listeners feel his fear is already practising art.
Reason alone concludes that a finite life is meaningless; for Tolstoy, faith is the knowledge of the meaning of life by which people actually live, because it relates the finite to the infinite.
The peasants of A Confession work, suffer and die without despair because they believe their lives belong to something greater.
The kingdom of God is neither a future reward nor an institution but a law of love present in each conscience; obeying it means placing conscience above state, church and public opinion.
In South Africa Gandhi read The Kingdom of God Is Within You around 1894, and in 1910 he named a cooperative settlement Tolstoy Farm.