Tolstoy : Leo (Lev) Nikolayevich Tolstoi (1828-1910), Russian novelist & philosopher. Moral & social elements play a great role in his later works, for which he is much respected. His most famous is War & Peace.
... Mystery and Excellence of the Human Body Leo Tolstoy Page 228 Natashas Illness Leo Tolstoy was born in 1828 in an aristocratic Russian family. He wrote between 1863 and 1877 his two great masterpieces. War and Peace and Anna Karenina. War and Peace is an immense panorama of Russian life in the early nineteenth century, including Napoleon's... the major moral conflicts of the book: between romantic self-realisation and service to others. The inner tensions Tolstoy dramatized so powerfully in these two books began to overwhelm him personally. He underwent a shattering psychological crisis which culminated in 1879. Tolstoy emerged from his agonized quest for the purpose of life with the simple answer that it was "to do good". He renounced... advance these ideas. Tolstoy also attempted to bring his own daily life into conformity with his philosophical views. He gave up smoking and drinking, became a vegetarian, dressed in peasant clothes and engaged in manual labours. He died in 1910, at the age of 82. The brief extract from War and Peace given below is an example of the remarkable psychological insight of Tolstoy. It also conveys a ...
... understand that it was not very reasonable. He had set out to travel all over the world with that in mind, and when people asked him his name he would say “Tolstoy.” Now, Tolstoy … There were people who did not know that (the great writer Leo) Tolstoy had died, and they thought: “Oh, we are going to hear something extraordinary!” And then he came out with that!’ 12 Hardly two months after their... for her, Tagore presented her with his typewriter, which is still kept among the Mother’s memorabilia in the Sri Aurobindo Ashram. Among the other people the Richards met in Tokyo was ‘a son of Tolstoy,’ on a world tour to propagate his bizarre ideas about redeeming the world. As the world was obviously in a deep crisis, the proposals for an ideal solution were legion and often quite eccentric. ‘In ...
... cit. Strophe 10. 24 H.P. BLAVATSKY: The Voice of the Silence. " SWINBURNE: On the Verge, in 'A Midsummer Vacation.' Page 151 Appendix VII At about the age of fifty, Tolstoy relates that he began to have moments of perplexity, of what he calls arrest, as if he knew not 'how to live,' or what to do. It is obvious that these were moments in which the excitement and interest... what he took for a passing disorder means the most momentous thing in the world for him, means his death. These questions 'Why?' 'Wherefore?' 'What for? found no response. "I felt," says Tolstoy, "that something had broken within me on which my life always rested, that I had nothing left to hold on to, and that morally my life had stopped. An invincible force impelled me to get rid of my... that they have recognized that the very thing which was leading me to despair — the meaningless absurdity of life — is the only incontestable knowledge accessible to man." To prove this point, Tolstoy quotes the Buddha, Solomon, and Schopenhauer. And he finds only four ways in which men of his own class and society are accustomed to meet the situation. Either mere animal blindness, sucking the honey ...
... making him understand that it was not very reasonable! He had set out to travel all over the world for that, and when people asked him his name he would say "Tolstoy"—now, Tolstoy, you know... People said, "Oh!'—some people didn't know that Tolstoy was dead—and they thought: "Oh! what luck, we are going to hear something remarkable"—and then he came out with that! Page 105 Well, this is only ...
... The names of Tolstoy, Emerson, Ruskin and Morris cannot be used for upholding entirely the Marxist view Page 46 of art. Surely, these men were purposeful and had the good of society at large in mind: they were, however, not in the least materialistic, they were poles apart from believing the individual to be real only in relation to society. Tolstoy was religious... not be all in all. And to deem them not all in all is hardly to hold a brief for art for art's sake in a narrow barren sense. The art-critic who found fault with Nehru's doctrine and cited Tolstoy, Emerson, Ruskin and Morris on his own behalf sought to justify the artist's drawing inspiration from within himself, from his own profound emotions and personal ideals and individual heights rather ...
... suppose. SRI AUROBINDO: Feeling? What feeling? PURANI: Such as an agriculturist or farmer can understand. That is their conception and in that they are followers of Tolstoy. You know Gandhi is greatly influenced by Tolstoy and follows his view of art, the puritanic and popular view. SRI AUROBINDO: That puritanic element exists in many places. Even Ruskin who was considered an authority on... would squirm with agony. PURANI: For such people everything should be simple, bare, austere and poor. I don't understand why poverty should be made to appear so great. SRI AUROBINDO: Because Tolstoy said it and Gandhi said it after him! PURANI: He is also against temples. There is no necessity of temples according to him. As somebody said, churches are not necessary, for the Bible can be read ...
... Kanta Gupta - Vol. 7 Tagore the Unique IT is no hyperbole to say that Tagore is to Bengali literature what Shakespeare is to English, Goethe to German, Tolstoy to Russian, or Dante to Italian and, to go into the remoter past, what Virgil was to Latin and Homer to Greek or, in our country, what Kalidasa was to ancient Sanskrit. Each of these stars of the first... Greek respectively. Properly speaking Tagore may not be classed Page 177 with them. But just as Shakespeare may be said to have led the English language across the border or as Tolstoy made the Russian language join hands with the wide world or as Virgil and Goethe imparted a fresh life and bloom, a fuller awakening of the soul of poetry, to Latin and to German, so too is Tagore ...
... back. DR. MANILAL: Wasn't it a sin to burn her? (Laughter) SRI AUROBINDO: They didn't care a damn whether it was a sin, not having studied Jainism like Manilal. (Laughter) DR. MANILAL: Tolstoy had some realisation, Sir, didn't he? SRI AUROBINDO: How? DR. MANILAL: Otherwise how could he write about angels etc? (Laughter) SRI AUROBINDO: I suppose you know that a writer has imagination... led a moral life. SRI AUROBINDO: Oh! Did he? He never succeeded in living a moral life—as far as I know. He became a mystic, at least tried to but never led a moral life. Are you interested in Tolstoy? DR. MANILAL: In some principles of his. SRI AUROBINDO: What are they? DR. MANILAL: I have forgotten. Sir. (Laughter) It was long ago I read him. SRI AUROBINDO: Principles like those ...
... 4.CRACKED VASE—Rachael Naomi Remen 5.ONE AMONGST YOU—Chassid 6.GOD HAS DONE HIS SHARE—Zen 7.FOX AND TIGER—Sufi 8.SEVEN DAYS, SEVEN WEEKS—Buddhist 9.THREE QUESTIONS—Leo Tolstoy 10.TEARS OF THE BLESSED—Zen 11.THE BRAVE PARROT—Early Buddhist 12.WHAT DO THEY NEED—Father Theophane 13.FAITH AND THE DOLPHIN—Contemporary 14.CHANGE MYSELF FIRST—Sufi ... THE PRINCE WONDERFUL—the tale of a prince who taught the law 3.BY WHICH ALL MEN MUST LIVE 4.THE POOL OF ENCHANTMENT—a tale of triumph of wisdom over death 5.THE WISDOM OF CHILDREN—Leo Tolstoy 6.DAVID COPPERFIELD—Charles Dickens 7.MY ELDER BROTHER—PremChand 8.COROMANDEL FISHERS—Sarojini Naidu 9.CASABLANCA—Felicia Hemans 10.SOCRATES 11.REMINISCENCES—Rabindra ...
... sinfulness of falsehood, the judge becomes convinced that capital punishment is a crime against humanity, the man called upon to the battlefield feels, like the conscientious objector of today or as a Tolstoy would feel, that Page 34 in no circumstances is it permissible to take human life any more than to eat human flesh? It is obvious that here the moral law which is above all relative duties ...
... Tantra, 105 Taoists, 190 tapasyd, III taxes, 221 terrorism, 56, 93, 246 theosophy, 94, 200 Tibet, 251 -253 Tilak, Bal Gangadhar, Lokmanya, 17,132, 148, ISS , 160, 185, 195,246 tolerance, 179 Tolstoy Tolstoy's, ISI, 176 tradition, 191,240-241 totals, 32 , 44 Page 270 truth, 37 , 57 , 112, 122 , 197 infinite, 204 loyalty to , 206-207 monopoly of, 190 new Truth ...
... speaking of all the depths. So when you say as many do, "Ah! If that were not there in the world, how fine the world would be", you are displaying your ignorance. I met in Japan one of the sons of Tolstoy; he was going round the world preaching human unity. He had caught this from his father and was going everywhere in the world preaching human unity. I met him at some friends' place and asked him, ...
... puts the rest of the week away and amuses oneself. In reality, the European has not succeeded in getting rid of religion from his life. It is coming back in Socialism, in the Anarchism of Bakunin and Tolstoy, in many other isms ; and in whatever form it comes, it insists on engrossing the whole of life, moulding the whole of society and politics under the law of idealistic aspiration. It does not use ...
... external things by an inner standard and is interested in them not for their own sake but for their value to the soul's self-development, its psychic, religious, ethical or other self-expression? Are Tolstoy and Gandhi examples of introverts? Or in another field Goethe? Or does it mean one who cares for external things only as they touch his own mind or else concern his own ego? But that I suppose would ...
... civilisation; there may have been a simple communism without over-government, large armies or wars of aggression, or even an entire absence of government, a human freedom & natural coordination such as Tolstoy & other European idealists have seen again in their dreams,—for it is at least conceivable that, given certain spiritual conditions which would constitute, in the language of religion, a kingdom of ...
... life and ideals of the average European. In Positivism Europe has attempted to arrive at a higher synthesis, the synthesis of humanity; and Socialism and philosophical Anarchism, the Anarchism of Tolstoy and Spencer, have even envisaged the application of the higher intellectual synthesis to life. In India we do not recognise the nation as the highest synthesis to which we can rise. There is a higher ...
... to return love for hatred, never discouraged violence in Page 95 defence of a cause that was just. The absolute adherence to ahimsa was derived by Gandhi from Tolstoy: It does not reflect the flexible and many-sided spiritual wisdom of original Hinduism. There is also another fact which leads us to question whether Gandhi, for all his veneration of ...
... landscapes and the buildings, about the cleanliness and politeness but also the mental rigidity of the people, about her encounters with persons of all kinds, Rabindranath Tagore and the son of Leo Tolstoy among them. But she was silent about her intimate but fierce struggle with the Asura who was her companion, except that at the end of those four years she had not won the battle and therefore had ...
... used to put before me and she was eager to learn whatever I had to teach her. When she became engaged to a tall Apollo of a Swede, she would invite me in the mornings to talk to her on Ibsen or Tolstoy or some other literary celebrity and she would in the evenings amaze more her fiancé with her versatile knowledge. Inhabiting a human body she could not escape altogether "the thousand natural ...
... another illustration in the same category.³ There are many other illustrations such as those of Tulsidasa and Surdasa and many others. A remarkable illustration is provided by William James where Tolstoy, at the height of the glory of his literary career, began to feel that Page 11 something had broken within him and that he had nothing left to hold on to, and that morally his life had ...
... sinfulness of falsehood, the judge becomes convinced that capital punishment is a crime against humanity, the man called upon to the battlefield feels, like the conscientious objector of today or as a Tolstoy would feel, that in no circumstances is it permissible to take human life any more than to eat human flesh? It is obvious that here the moral law which is above all relative duties must prevail; and ...
... Sri Aurobindo's Integral Education Dissatisfaction with the conventional education of the time may be traced back to Jean Jacques Rousseau; it was expressed forcefully later by Tolstoy. But a clear awareness of the true needs of education dawned really with this century. In the U.S.A., Dewey wrote: The child is the starting-point, the center, and the end. His ...
... making advances to girls in a public place. These things are possible because man's psychology is complex. Once after the Barisal Conference I went to see Mahendranath Nandi who was called the Tolstoy of Brahmanbaria. His grandfather was a Tantric and could meditate sitting upon the waters of a river. From him perhaps Nandi got his spiritual capacities. Nandi used to be guided by an inner voice ...
... leave the early security of his cave in order to build up his enormous palace of Civilisation. This again is what is behind his dream of moving earth and sky. Do you want, like Gandhi, Rousseau or Tolstoy, to return to that early state of Nature? "Of course, the west has always tried to conquer the world around while Asia, particularly India, has sought to master the worlds within. And conquest of ...
... spiritual foundations, as the result of an inner revolution bringing about the effective containment, if not the total annihilation, of the human ego. During the latter part of his life, the great Tolstoy, who had been a soldier himself when young and was the author of the epic novel, War and Peace, became (like Thoreau and Mahatma Gandhi) a pacifist, an apologist of non-violence, and an advocate ...
... for a judgment on our spirituality, but see rather what are the impressions of open-minded men of religious feeling and experience who can alone be judges, a spiritual and religious thinker such as Tolstoy, for instance. Or I may study even, allowing for an inevitable bias, what the more cultured Christian missionary has to say about a religion which he can no longer dismiss as a barbarous superstition ...
... external things by an inner standard and is interested in them not 'for their own sakes' but for their value to the soul's self-development, its psychic, religious, ethical or other self-expression? Are Tolstoy and Gandhi examples of introverts? Or, in another field — Goethe? Or does it mean one who cares for external things only as they touch his own mind or else concern his ego? But that I suppose would ...
... have the strong feeling that, with my publishing house, I have to steer toward a deepened religion without dogmas, and that the forthcoming period will most probably produce the men needed for this. Tolstoy, Eugen Schmitt and Emerson are for me the first steps in this direction. Also Meister Eckhart.” 733 As Ulbricht tells us, the shaken and confused intellectuals around 1900 looked for the presence of ...
... should be thought that Rolland gives a carte blanche to egoism on the artist's part, we must note that for him the true artist is he who never lies on a bed of roses. Rolland agrees with what Tolstoy wrote in a letter to him: "The vindication of the truly artistic vocation lies in the trials and tribulations cheerfully suffered and nobly accepted." But he does not go the whole way with Tolstoy's ...
... monster is a miracle far beyond the patient rounding-off practised by less inspired, less elementally creative spirits. I went through Tolstoy's Anna Karenina immediately after Dostoievsky: Tolstoy is indeed a master in his own field, even a fine hand at arousing the moods of pity and terror, but how weak and watery seemed the sorrowful vicissitudes and emotional crises which he described, in ...
... poet's own psychology. This peculiarity of the age is noticeable even in many creators whose aim is deliberately realistic or their method founded upon a minute psychological observation, Ibsen or Tolstoy and the Russian novelists. The self of the creator very visibly overshadows the work, is seen everywhere like the conscious self of Vedanta both containing and inhabiting all his creations. Shakespeare ...
... the gift of invisibility. Or perhaps he means intellectuals like Romain Rolland or else Roman Catholic priests and cardinals or the Reverend Holmes or pacifists like Lord Robert Cecil or in the past Tolstoy who spent his whole life trying in vain to live according to his ideals. Idealising intellectualism and religionism are all that is left of spirituality in Europe. Page 418 ...
... realism. What all artists do is to take something from life—even if it be only a partial hint—and transfer it by the magic of their imagination and make a world of their own; the realists, e.g., Zola, Tolstoy, do it as much as anybody else. Each artist is a creator of his own world—why then insist on this legal fiction that the artist's world must appear as an exact imitation of the actual world around ...
... though the garb is Indian the essential spirit is Christian. He may not be Christ, but at any Page 175 rate he comes in continuation of the same impulsion. He is largely influenced by Tolstoy, the Bible, and has a strong Jain tinge in his teachings; at any rate more than by the Indian scriptures—the Upanishads or the Gita which he interprets in the light of his own ideas. Many ...
... it should be thought that Rolland gives a carte blanche to egoism on the artist's part, we must note that for him the true artist is he who never lies on a bed of roses. Rolland agrees with what Tolstoy wrote in a letter to him: "The vindication of the truly artistic vocation lies in the trials and tribulations cheerfully suffered and nobly accepted." But he does not go the whole way with Tolstoy's ...
... class of monks and, while conjuring humanity to return love for hatred, never discouraged violence in defence of a cause that was just. The absolute adherence to ahimsa was derived by Gandhi from Tolstoy: it does not reflect the flexible and many-sided spiritual wisdom of original Hinduism. There is also another fact which leads us to question whether Gandhi, for all his veneration of the Gita ...
... Rhine were unwilling to give up the Code Napoleon and the institutions he had brought into existence. SATYENDRA: They say his Russian Campaign was a proof that he was not a military genius. It is Tolstoy who belittles him in his War and Peace . SRI AUROBINDO: War and Peace is a novel after all. SATYENDRA: There Tolstoi says that Napoleon blundered by burning Moscow. SRI AUROBINDO: But, ...
... Three Men in a Boat by Jerome K. Jerome, the humour and wisdom of which will be more enjoyable by reading it directly without being .told what it is about. An extract from War and Peace, where Leo Tolstoy describes Natasha's illness, makes interesting reading not only by virtue of its literary elegance but also by the subtle message that it aims to convey about the natural capacity of the body to heal ...
... another illumination in the same category. There are many other illustrations such as those of Tulasidasa and Surdasa and many others. A remarkable illustration is provided by William James where Tolstoy, at the height of the glory of his literary career, began to feel that something had broken within him and that he had nothing left to hold on to, and that morally his life had stopped. The questions ...
... his way. Sri Aurobindo had a quiet sincere love for her and she had towards her husband an unquestioning obedience." This in brief is the picture of her unhappy life at Calcutta. As rightly said by Tolstoy, "It is not so easy to be married to an exceptional genius. It is like living by the bank of a great river, it can overflow the bank." Page 7 However, there were a few short interludes ...
... of wealth), self-control and service are some of the elements on which India would rebuild her life. Among religions, Jainism, Vaishnavism and Christianity influenced him. Among leaders of thought Tolstoy inspired him. The rejuvenated India should, according to him, build her life on (1) rejection of machinery, (2) rejection of medicine, that is, of all the systems except naturopathy, ( 3 ) acceptance ...
... taken some of the formal elements of beauty and have tried to reduce all art to them. Form is certainly an element of beauty, but there are other things also. Roger Fry pays a great compliment to Tolstoy for pointing out that art is not in the object and the only purpose of art is communication. Art mainly conveys emotion from the artist to other men. Sri Aurobindo : The first part is acceptable ...
... meant the galloping pace of consumerism, the proliferation of the expensive inessentials and the subjugation of mind and soul to the blandishments of the paradise of the electronic gods. Thoreau, Tolstoy and Gandhi were also among the prophets of the simple life, and asked for the elimination of all surplusage. But although wealth by itself is no evil, for wealth too comes from the Divine and could ...
... Teresa, Mother 552 Théon, Alma 21-5 Théon, Max 21-5, 191 Thompson, Francis 28 Thoreau, H.D. 186, 485 Tiruvalluvar 485 Tilak, Lokamanya E.G. 199 Togo Mukherjee 723. Tolstoy, Leo 108, 186, 485 Truman, President Harry 488 Udar (L.M. Pinto) 278-9, 435, 493ff, 685, 691, 723, 788, 795, 817 Uma Sahasram 257-8 Underhill, Evelyn 61, 96 U.N.O. 446 Vasudha Shah ...
... asceticism is only a phrase. You might just as well say that politics is an art or that cooking is the greatest of arts or apply that phrase to bridge or boxing or any other human field of effort. As for Tolstoy's dictum it is that of a polemist, a man who had narrowed himself to one line of ideas—and such people can say anything. There is the same insufficiency about the other quotations. An artist or a poet ...
... a deep-seated moral disease is at work eating into the vitals of European society of which a thousand symptoms strike the eye, from the extreme of bomb-throwing Anarchism to the other extreme of Tolstoy's Utopianism. Is India to be infected with the disease? The present conditions of government in this country are full of the germs of the Occidental malady, and if India is to escape from it, it must ...
... one asks one's friends and those around one to be not what they are but what one would like them to be—one can form an ideal for oneself and want to apply it to everybody, but... This reminds me of Tolstoy's son whom I met in Japan and who was going round the world in the hope of bringing about unity among men. His intentions were excellent, but his way of doing it seemed less happy! He said with an ...
... must be free to use his wings even if they carry him above the comprehension of the public of the day or of the general run of critics or lead him into lonely places. That is all that matters. Tolstoy's logic is out of place. Nobody says that the value of the poet must be measured by the scantiness of his audience any more than it can be measured by the extent of his contemporary popularity. So there ...
... রাজনীতিকে spiritualise কৰ্ত্তে চায়, যেমন গান্ধী, ঠিক পথটী ধৰ্ত্তে পাচ্ছে না ৷ গান্ধী কি করছেন? অহিংসা পরম ধৰ্ম্ম, jainism, হরতাল, passive resistance ইত্যাদির খিচুড়ি করে সত্যাগ্রহ বলে একরকম Indianised Tolstoyism দেশে আনছেন, ফল হবে যদি কোনও স্থায়ী ফল হয় এক রকম Indianised Bolshevism ৷তাঁহার কৰ্ম্মে আমার আপত্তি নাই, যাঁর যে প্রেরণা, তিনি তাহাই করুন ৷ তবে এটী আসল বস্তু নয় ৷ এই সকল অশুদ্ধ রূপে spiritual শক্তি ...
... practitioner and an active sympathiser with the Indian freedom movement. Shumei: 'We sat together in meditation every night for an hour.' Gives the talk 'To the Women of Japan'. Meets one of Tolstoy's sons, then on a tour to promote world unity through uniformity of dress, language, life style etc. Tells him, 'It would be a poor world, not worth living in.' Meets Rabindranath Tagore in Tokyo ...
... Kuznetsov, Chairman of the International Einstein Committee, has recounted: In Einstein's attitude towards death we find a certain synthesis of Tolstoy's sense of kinship with nature and the absorption in human problems characteristic of Dostoyevsky. When a visitor once asked Einstein how he would judge his life on ...
... happenings which came tumbling into being, one after the other, during the next six months. Nothing that took place in Pestalozzi's school at Iverdun, or in Froebel's Anstalt at Neuheim, or amongst Tolstoy's peasant children can equal it for sheer wonder. It reads like a fairy story. Everyone who wishes to understand the origin of the Montessori method — Page 348 and indeed the method ...
... Gandhi doing? Making a hodgepodge called satyāgraha out of ahimsā paramo dharmah [non-violence is the highest law], Jainism, hartal, passive resistance, etc.; bringing a sort of Indianised Tolstoyism into the country. The result—if there is any lasting result—will be a sort of Indianised Bolshevism. I have no objection to his work; let each one act according to his own inspiration. But that is ...
... must be free to use his wings even if they carry him above the comprehension of the public of the day or of the general run of critics or lead him into lonely places. This is all that matters. Tolstoy's logic is out of place. Nobody says that the value of the poet must be measured by the scantiness of his audience any more than it can be measured by the extent of his con- temporary popularity. So ...
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