Quotes by Leo Tolstoy

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Art is one of the ways of communication between people... The particularity of this way of communication, distinguishing it from communication through the word, consists in the fact that, through the word, a person conveys his thoughts to another person, while through art they convey each other's feelings.

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To evoke a once-experienced feeling and, reliving it, convey it through movements, lines, colors, images expressed in words, so that the other feels the same feeling - this is what the activity of art consists of.

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The hero of my stories, whom I love with all my soul, the one whom I tried to paint in all his splendor and who was, is and always will be worthy of admiration, is the Truth!

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The mission of the artist should not be to solve a problem absolutely, but to compel us to love life, in its countless and endless aspects.

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Any false criticism that praises decadent art is the door through which all talentless people rush.

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If a man has a sense of duty, the feeling that he is obliged to do something, that man is already religious.

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Although Jews are smart and want access to education, I have no understanding of aspiring to be admitted to institutions of higher learning, nor of converting to another religion because of it.

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There are people who like to talk and write a lot. They don't listen to what you say, and in turn they talk together. All you have to do is remain silent in their presence.

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Most of our friends are the ones we don't know. They know what to do and keep quiet.

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Darkness is the cradle of the Sun. Stars need darkness.

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The connection between knowledge and science is the same as between religion and the church.

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Nietzsche represents the decadence of philosophy.

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We should not pity the good, but the bad, they suffer more.

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I do not regret the separation of those from Little Russia *. Progress means closeness. We don't have to relive the past.

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Maupassant is a wonder. It describes the vileness of this life amazingly well.

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Rocks, birds, are given to fly, and men are given to live wisely, and they preferred to live badly and fly. They will not fly like rocks, and they will lose their minds completely.

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It's amazing how the Truth is hidden by miracles, rituals!

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Any participation in political activity is absolutely useless.

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There is nothing more difficult to endure in the world than the death of your child. The hangman - out of the question!

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Religion is the establishment of your relationship with the world and the obligations that arise from it.

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The weaker the belief, the greater the desire to spread it.

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[About The Brothers Karamazov.] Abominable. From an artistic point of view the descriptions are good, but there is an irony out of place in it. In the conversations of the heroes, however, Dostoevsky himself speaks. Ah, it's not good, it's not good! The seminarian and the abbot, Ivan Karamazov in turn, all use the same language. It surprises me that Dostoevsky is so valued. Religious matters, which are the deepest in the spiritual life, are those which are cherished by the public. I am severe with him about that thing which I myself repent of, the purely artistic side. But he is valued for the religious side, this spiritual struggle so full of strength in Dostoevsky... But art does not tolerate mediocrity. The reader must put himself in the situation, feel what the author feels.

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[About The Brothers Karamazov.] Ugly. It is not artistic, it invents, it exaggerates... The ideas are wonderful, the religious content... It is strange that it enjoys such glory.

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Selfishness, the family, the state, humanity are the fulfillment of God's will, the motives that set in motion.

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Religious truth is only that which is in motion.

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[Regarding the sect of "Jidanites".] Why "Judaites" instead of "Jidanites"? In the past "Jidan" indicated nationality, but now it has become a term of abuse. These sects are interesting mainly because they deny orthodoxy. freed from obedience to the church, therefore it is easier for them to reach a free understanding. But they do not have an original, universal relationship with God.

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There are people to whom you have to explain everything in detail, clarify every word.

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[About The Brothers Karamazov.] I can say that the stories of Abbot Zosima and "The Grand Inquisitor" contain many good things. But they are exaggerated, they have no sense of measure. Besides, the "Grand Inquisitor" is so-and-so. But Zosima's stories, especially the last ones, the ones noted by Alioșa, contain good ideas.

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Dostoevsky has a strange style, a strange language! All characters express themselves using the same language. His characters act original and eventually you get used to it and the originality becomes trivial. He was throwing away the most serious problems by mixing them with romantic matters.

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You must be prepared that your son will want to live a different life. I advise you to expect it. It is a mistake to want to organize other people's lives, even if they are our children. Among other prejudices from which humanity suffers is the organization of other people's lives, on which the state is based, any government, social-revolutionary activity, and even the arrangement in the smallest details of our children's lives. We must strive to free ourselves from the desire to organize others. If I really want to organize others, I easily fall into the temptation of using violence. I want to free myself from the desire to organize.

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... The Russians have a strong sense of humanitarianism, but they have little respect for law and justice. It's very true. It is a characteristic feature on which despotism is partly based.

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Today I read part of the Sermon on the Mount. There's a lot more stuff, it's hard to read. It is written worse than Dostoyevsky. In the four Gospels they found less absurdities than in the rest, and made them Holy Scripture. Bible worship is idolatry of words, of text.

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Please remember that there are many other people besides Leo Tolstoy.

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It is difficult to determine the point at which dementia begins.

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Good cannot be done through evil.

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The feeling of shame is a limitation of the self. How not to value it! Man's clothing covers what is carnal and reveals what is inspired.

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I'm reading Chernasevski, it's very interesting. He suffered from the mania of grandeur: "Darwin, Schopenhauer are fools"... Between us, he writes this in his correspondence with his sons, which is a shame that it is being published now. He was a smart man, but I didn't like him. I disliked him.

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The main characteristic of crazy people is that they are confident. But it's natural, there are enough confident people. At first, they talk like people with chairs in their heads, and when they see that everyone is listening, they start saying what's on their minds.

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The dreams of science. Children will be born scientifically. Scientific prejudice is repulsive... When you get into all of this you see that it is completely absurd. Science has become a commercial business, degrees are awarded. Just the fact that one teacher teaches the same course for ten years in a row... and it is not known why each teacher recommends his own book, stands it out among other books. (July 5)

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In Kuprin, there is memory, selection of characteristic features and content. Chekhov is a great talent, but he has no content. The French write either trifles or something profound like Pascal, Hugo, Voltaire.

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I feel that I am committing a great sin by encouraging writing, the most vain of occupations.

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The prayer-request is an expression of weakness. "God help me! ", although you know that only you can help yourself. It is quite another thing to address God disinterestedly.

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Pascal's musings are a péle-méle *; some are very weak, and next to them there are others very pregnant. For example, when he was attacked for writing against the Jesuits, Pascal said: "If I know that there are a hundred wells in the city, and one of them is poisoned, it is my duty to tell and show the poisoned one."

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When you compare the idea of ​​God in the peasant and the scientist, you see that the peasant accepts something inexplicable, whereas the scientist hides the inexplicable, and that is a big prejudice. The peasant is far above.

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I can't stand Zhukovsky: for me, Zhukovsky to Pushkin is like Paul to the Gospel. I can't stand Pavel.

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Out of faith, a man can calmly accept that his head be cut off, but it is also out of faith that he would cut off the head of his fellow man. A man with a rational conscience would not do the latter.

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I am often reproached for two things: that I am proud of the title of earl, and that I deal with the collection of money from writing.

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When I am asked what the maxim from the Talmud means: "Whether the pitcher falls on the stone, or the stone falls on the pitcher, it is always woe to the pitcher," I answer that this means that in the material world the grossest thing always wins.

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Artists strive to please the lords, but all need art, even the people. And as much as I love Chopin, I will not say that Chopin represents the art of the future, that he will remain forever, because his art satisfies an exclusive, small audience.

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In all religions there is a spiritual basis and an external, ritualistic perversion.

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In life there is a huge amount of joinings and appropriations. Some typical features seem fundamental, and other characteristic features are added to them. That makes it easier for us to understand people.

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The purpose of the artist is to unite the small features, scattered among an infinite number of people, in one person. When I was serious about writing, I tried to guess the type of man by a kind of direct feeling—what a difficult task! And now I don't think about the interpretation anymore, I see that they are only dreams.

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The Hindus have gone further than we have in the development of metaphysical science. For them, this is not the philosophy of a single social layer.

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Suicides are committed because of the lack of religious conscience, not the conscience that tells you to go to church, but the one that guides your life. Before they had faith, but now the absence of religion leads to madness, and madness to suicide.

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Schopenhauer said that if we judge others, we do what the dog barks at its reflection in the mirror.

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I like to see the moon on the left side and meet a woman with empty buckets, because I have freed myself from superstitions. (August 27)

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It's not the number of years you lived that matters, but how you used them.

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Diseases must be transformed into something useful for the soul. Humility, patience, striving not to be a burden to others. If the disease upsets you, then the suffering is unbearable. I will never forget the words of an old woman: "It's good to die in the summer, it's easier to dig the grave."

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Merezhkovski and Berdiaev are useless people. I do not condemn them, but I understood that they have less importance than what I attributed to them.

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I thought and wrote to the poets that in poems the idea must be new and expressed in the clearest and most beautiful way.

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You have to grow slowly, just like trees grow.

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To live well, we must keep death in mind, think about life without forgetting death.

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The most important thing is to develop your consciousness. By raising your consciousness, you act through yourself on others.

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Wisdom is knowing where to stop, knowing what is allowed and what is forbidden.

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For the religious man there are impossible deeds, for the irreligious there is nothing impossible to do.

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No matter how small my obol is, I must give it. The tool is small, but it has to work.

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I am comforted by the fact that I do not think at all about the time, what it will be, that I will not see the consequences of the revolution and I do not strive to find them out. They will be enormous.

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Community binds... Community is your separation from others. It is collective selfishness, and we need an identical attitude towards everyone.

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[On mankind.] The ideal is "one shepherd, one flock." The destruction of national fences. (April 5)

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When you see everything clearly, then you want to die more. When you grow old, you see clearly that the purpose of life is in no way a consequence, it is not a result... To work in the name of the purpose brings you a series of disappointments. But the inertia of this move makes it hard to stop.

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If I were young, I would go to China. The most conservative people. In eight years, the constitution will be introduced to them as well.

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The people think that dying is a job that you have to complete.

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[On the sanctification of the exhibition of meat products.] Wherever you look, whatever it is, you can't do it without a job.

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The most common method of the enemies of the truth: if someone says something offhand, they pretend that's all he said and contradict him.

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Censorship blocks temporarily, and temporarily achieves its goal, those in power need it.

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[On Gandhi.] Everything is wonderful about him, including Indian patriotism, which spoils everything.

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La Rochefoucauld said that it is rare to meet a woman who does not have lovers and even more rarely one who has only one lover.

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I don't know what my grandchildren will read. We had certain classics. Not long ago a gentleman came and asked me what I thought of Knut Hamsun. I haven't read it, I don't know. Now there are millions of such writers and an ocean of political specialists.

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When you deal with what is infinitely large or infinitely small, you reach no result.

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If Christ were to appear now, he would be asked for an autograph and nothing more.

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For me, astronomy is a vain occupation, it means dealing with trifles. Schopenhauer showed that the external world is only a form of our imagination... Nowadays, any educated person knows that space and time do not exist. The world existed, but we cannot know how it came into being. Moses' story of the creation of the world is preferable to the Darwinian theory of evolution. Following this path, I cannot reach any conclusion, therefore the path is false.

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Newspapers are harmful, they distract you from serious reading. I print what you don't need to know, all kinds of bad deeds, and the reader thinks to himself: "This is how good I am!"

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The ideal is to love animals. Humans have many bad habits that animals do not have, but humans also have that thing that sets them above animals: boundless spiritual ideals.

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I am horrified by the state of mind of the man who kills, the spiritual temptation to kill.

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Happy are those who do not read newspapers, the illiterate, the uninvolved, for they have common sense. To feel fully satisfied, we need to live more simply. Reading newspapers has increased the number of fools. We must read the literature of the sixties. Compared to them, today's writers are small children.

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The Chinese doctrine is difficult to penetrate, with the Japanese everything is clear, like with children.

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If there is something good and necessary for people in my writings, they will find their way to people. God has plenty of time.

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The only really necessary science, the only knowledge I need, is the knowledge of what I must do, how I must live, to lead my life to the best of my ability. All so-called scientific knowledge that does not lead to the answer to this question is useless. Mathematical knowledge, and partly physical and astronomical knowledge, is attractive and valuable as a means of refining and disciplining the mind. But, admitting this, we must not forget that, as Lichtenberg * says, "the brain's storage capacity is limited."

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Sometimes you write useless things only to find that you have to delete them. As long as they remain only in your thoughts, they trouble you, if you put them on paper, you see that they are superfluous.

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He who reaches my age does not care whether he lives or dies, he only strives to live his life well, to fulfill the will of God, and then he finds the true religion.

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Theosophists go beyond the limits of the mind, define the future life, talk about it from the perspective of time and space. But she is outside these conditions. In Kant we do not find such a thing. Kant distinguishes what reason can and cannot clarify. In Hegel, however, it is a talmes-balmes. You feel that there is no content.

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The value of the artist is seen in the wide range of moods he can move. A wide range is the essential quality of the artist, it allows him to go through different feelings, even the lowest, almost animal ones.

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I wonder who has a truer picture of the Sun. The peasant who knows where and when the Sun rises and sets and what work he performs until sunset, or the scientist who has no idea of ​​this, but only knows the imaginary line on which the Earth revolves around the Sun.

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People who live according to tradition, hypnotized by public opinion, represent 99 percent, those who research represent only one percent.

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I always feel that I do not take a step without God, but, I know well, the more clearly you imagine Him, the less you believe in Him.

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I have no doctrine. The truth is one in all doctrines. We must eliminate from them only what contradicts the truth.

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[On Freemasons.] This is what people call themselves who do not agree with Catholic doctrine.

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Self-sacrifice is a prejudice, a false belief.

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He who rules the earth will rule the people.

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Land cannot be personal property. He who rules the land rules the power.

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[On Herzen.] He is the revolutionary of the old type. Herzen is deep, fiery, serious.

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[About N. Gogol's statue in Moscow.] When I saw the statue it seemed good. Gogol has the face of a sufferer, of a man who sought God before death, reflects the feeling of suffering.

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If you are wise you can bear the lack of knowledge, if you are curious it is difficult.

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In the Talmud, narrow nationalist doctrine stands alongside the ultimate truths. Understandably, the former takes up a lot of space, and the latter a little.

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People cannot be spiritually superior or inferior, simply the spiritual consciousness of some is more or less hidden.

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Just as today it is written with horror about the way in which the peasants were once whipped, so in years to come it will be written about the fact that the land was privately owned.

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Slavic patriotism is good only because it belongs to the spiritual, religious and moral domain.

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When super people become people, they are as charming as can be.

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The community principle is strong when it is based on the religious principle.

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At first civilization pleases, then it bores.

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The peasants used to curse the priests. I stop them every time.

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How absurd it is to think that the old faith is good! How can you hold on to the old faith when you have the conscience of now? It's like an adult wearing children's clothes.

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I value Kant very much, but he is so heavy, so foggy. And Rousseau and especially Pascal expresses himself so brilliantly, clearly, beautifully!

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There are three kinds of people: courtiers, workers, and beggars. Hopis and beggars do not rely on themselves, and because they choose a lot, the laborers have little left.

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I believe that nothing good can be achieved through vardist, only bad. This superficial education means nothing if violence is used.... There is a means of education, through religion. In Shanghai, in the Chinese half of the city, there are no guards and there are no crimes, and in the European half it is full of guards and there are a lot of crimes...

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My celebrity makes me understand that nothing happens for nothing. Every action inevitably has consequences. I see that. I had forgotten my past deeds, and they continue to have repercussions. When you see this, you realize how important every deed, every word is.

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The Russian people have something of a herd, they follow the one with ideas. The others just join in, they want to do something, but they themselves don't think.

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Art is given exceptional importance. It is considered something superior. I know what food is, but I don't know what gastronomy is. Nowadays, "higher" art has come to self-destruct. The same decay is seen in science. I recently read Weininger. The decay of art and science began long ago. Now they began to make great demands on life, and dealing with poetry became an inconvenient thing. They used to flog [the peasants] and take care of poetry. This refined art is doomed to perish. It appeared in the classes that lived in the most reprehensible way, in the social blanket that led a repulsive life. But because something superior to it began to appear in this world, it (art) perishes.

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These phenomena, what we call true art (songs, fairy tales, fables), are all good. Novels appeared because the rich had nothing to do. Some wrote, others read this nonsense and thought (myself included) that they were dealing with something of great importance. I don't see how these ideas of mine could seem unclear to anyone. Here in Russia, a hundred million people do not have access to this art.

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[On sex.] I'm not saying that I lived well. I lived miserably. I say that abstinence is possible and necessary.

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God, why do Romanian people write? We are all under the spell of aesthetics. Hegel's philosophy has impressed us so much that sometimes we unconsciously Hegelianize. Not all ethics are ethics. We must not cram everything into this concept, but only Christian ethics.

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The people are better than the intelligentsia because they believe in something. Intellectuals who do not go to church and do not believe are more to be feared, they instill external rituals in the people.

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The older I get, the clearer it is to me that the state is an obsolete form. If I live, I will write about it. In fact, there is a Law of God and human relationships are based on it, but people have the most stupid principle as their foundation stone.

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Muhammad always quotes the Gospel. He does not recognize Christ as God and does not give himself as God. Mohammedans have no god but God, and Mohammed is his prophet. There are no dogmas, no secrets. Which religion is better: Orthodoxy or Mohammedanism? It is clear to me that Mohammedanism is better. Mohammedanism helped me a lot.

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... As man evolves, so does the religious foundation, which is the same in the Vedas, Taoism, Buddhism, Christianity, Mohammedanism. The basis evolves over time towards simplification and unification.

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Only love, religious love brings freedom. But love is love only when its indispensable condition is the non-use of violence.

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Pornography is one aspect of the media, another aspect is the incitement to crime and evil.

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It is a grave crime for parents to instill in their children things that they themselves do not really believe. The great Kant said that we must educate children not for the existing order of life, but for the one that will come, that will be.

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Material progress is represented by roads and electric wires, spiritual progress leads from prophets and icons to the Christian doctrine of good. The religious consciousness of mankind must progress in its turn. And if you don't follow it, if you don't follow religious progress, you will remain a savage. Progress is visible in everything, not only in the spiritual field. Religion sets mankind in motion, and if it sets mankind in motion, then religion is in motion.

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It is the spiritual life that some blame you for, and you continue to behave the same way. Such people will be more and more with time, but now they do not exist. We are inclined to deceive ourselves. We do everything for worldly glory, to gain the recognition of those whose opinion counts in our eyes, and we take all this as spiritual life.

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We Slavs have a strong patriotic feeling. We must fight against him. We enslave ourselves. If we do not enslave ourselves, no one can enslave us. There is a natural attraction to your people, mine to the Russian, although I strive not to be a Russian, but a Christian. Patriotism is harmful.

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Suicides are committed by the duplicated people. It is a kind of intermediate state, he who lives to his heart's desire, lives as long as he keeps the hope of living well. But those who live a spiritual life know that they cannot kill themselves.

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The orthodoxy of Solovyov *, of Bulgakov ** is false, artificial and insincere. As long as people believed in the state, things were going well, but now, when everyone is disappointed and aggravated, the state has lost its meaning. As well as the idea of ​​justice in our country, this idea was born and died before my eyes.

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Everything I wrote about women is nonsense. If I had said everything I know about women...

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If I were to switch to all the beliefs to which I am persistently invited to switch (Bishop Hermogenes *, Orthodox, Theosophists, Baptists and others) it would turn out to be a real talmes-balmes!

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It is not about perfection in the matter of morality. Perfection is inaccessible to mankind. Morality is about approaching the ideal. And the argument that perfection is unattainable is made by those who encourage murder, because they justify crime by the impossibility of attaining the ideal.

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I admit that there are many wonderful people among the revolutionaries. They stand out for their character and selflessness, but they do not love God. The religious man will never try to find the answer to the question of what to do for the happiness of mankind, he always knows, at every moment, what he must do.

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[About the Jews.] There are two categories: some have all the negative traits, others have all the positive ones.

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The intelligentsia is a contemptible clique of which in a few decades not even the name will remain.

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[On Russian intellectuals.] They just repeat what Europe said, but they don't think with their own minds.

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He who questions whether God exists and what God is, does not have God.

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I understand my sister's Orthodoxy, but the Orthodoxy of Solovyov (Vladimir Sergeevich Solovyov (1853-1900), Russian philosopher), of Bulgakov (Serghei Nikolaevich Bulgakov (1871-1944)) I do not understand at all. Maria Nikolaevna has that attitude of devotion to God and obedience which is the basis of everything. And if the man doubts, then a mess comes out like in Solovyov.

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Nothing diverts a man from his way home more than human praise, the opinion of others about him, and the effort to please men, when in fact we should disregard the opinion of our fellows and live only for God. I don't like praise, I like shame. If I am in a bad mood and read a letter that reproaches me, it upsets me, if I am in a good mood, it makes me happy. It is useful to me, it draws me to God.

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No amount of inventions or improvements can lead to moral good.

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In artistic works, everything must be natural, believable. When you read, you must live what you read, and then everything is natural, there is no false note, and at the same time there must be a feeling there that moves you constantly. If these two elements meet, then it is natural.

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Theater and music have two sides, one is the interpretation, the other is the thing itself. During the performance, the work itself is forgotten, because a good performance overshadows the work. Sometimes the content of the work is confused with the interpretation. The interpretation is good, but the content is not good at all. In music, the chords are wonderful, sometimes you hear some chords that bring tears to your eyes, the technique is amazing, the work is not good, but it makes a strong impression. And these praises and the impression of interpretation spoil the author, who thinks that the praises are addressed to him. If you read the same piece, you will throw it away out of boredom. But when the performance is full of talent you enjoy watching it. The same can be said about music. It is not the same in our profession, in literature and in poetry.

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Art must be simple, clear, accessible to the people and, at the same time, permeated by the breath of life. What we write must capture the soul and be clear.

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The prayer of the Jews is lamentation, ecstasy.

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Science can provide neither morality nor religion.

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What an attitude the revolutionaries have towards their activity, how disappointed they were, how terrible were the consequences of their activity and the activity of the government! How did this fall upon the people! It makes me sick, but this is all for the best. Necessarily for good, whatever God does is good.

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It always happens that we want to do things that we no longer have the strength to do. I would also like to write something literary, but I can't hold on anymore.

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[About the Russian tsars.] Nikolai Pavlovich is great, Aleksandr Nikolaevich is likeable (not in appearance, but because he freed the peasants), Aleksandr Aleksandrovich is foreign, rude, insensitive, Nikolai Aleksandrovich is insignificant. I don't know if age makes me have such opinions about the latter.

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Patriotism is the instilling of prejudice, a tradition that does not correspond to the current consciousness of Russians. Greatness of Russia! Her only advantage is that Finns hate us, Caucasians hate us...

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It's not a pun, it's not a joke, it's reality. If we stop resisting evil, the evil will no longer have the power. They hold the power under the current opposition.

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They say I'm a good psychologist. But I don't understand suicide. I have never been in such a state. It is clear to me that she is motivated by very shallow feelings. Because if you rise to the sphere of freedom, all that disappears.

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Some people didn't end up needing God. If they end up in need, they will no longer discuss and argue about the word "God".

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Humans are rational beings - what a prejudice!

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Shyness is a good trait. The shy feels the needs of other people.

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... The work of scientists is an attempt to obtain results without the effort of thought, of the intellect, results that are normally obtained through the intellect.

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How boring the Bible is, how many times I have read from it and I have not been able to read it all the way through. This is what happens when religion is reinforced by books.

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We must refrain from religiously influencing children and just answer their questions. Sometimes these questions are hard, they seem unbelievable, so we have to answer their honest questions.

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... The upper social blanket lived their living. Hope remains in the people, that part of them that is still in the stage of childhood, that is not contaminated by false reasonings and prejudices.

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Illiterates sometimes, not always, but often have two great advantages: memory and knowledge.

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There is a method to solve social problems: to transfer everything to the personal attitude towards good and evil in the world, not to participate in evil ourselves, and thus we solve social problems best.

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... The main difference between people is that some are religious and some are irreligious. Just as horses are gray or black, so men are of two kinds. There are people for whom religious issues don't exist... Just as you can't talk to a peasant boy in French, you can't talk to these people on religious topics.

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I will die convinced that patriotism and racial nationalism are finished. God forbid racial union.

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Yesterday I was in a state of indifference to everything, of depression. Then you can understand other people you usually resent. There are people who spend nine days out of ten in this state.

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I have always respected Mahomedanism. Mahomedanism, such as it is, is above church doctrine.

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The practice of Mohammedanism did not require a radical transformation of life, as did the practice of Christianity.

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No disease causes me more pity than mental alienation, because with the mentally alienated, unlike all other sick and dying people, no communication of any kind is possible.

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The intelligentsia is nothing but a new social blanket that will take the place of the capitalists, the officials.

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It seems to me that obedience to the government is like obedience to a band of robbers. The government is an immoral assembly. The case of Azef * is telling for the immorality of the government.

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It's amazing how people can live without regard for death!

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I think metaphysics is necessary. A philosopher said that the truth is revealed to people on the one hand through metaphysics, on the other through religion. Both just need to be simple and clear.

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The light is already in every man. It is in both the bad and the good man, we just have to distinguish it. Passions prevent it from manifesting itself. The light exists in every man, he only has to gather his strength and remove what hides it.

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... People strive to get, they want exactly what they do not need: wealth, erudition.

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In the good spiritual realm there is only one good thing: that which is spiritual. Beauty and poetry are not to be confused here.

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Victor Hugo is a force, Herzen as well. They have a certain spiritual energy, certain precious demands. Dickens, Dostoevsky Schiller have them too. Dostoevsky is confused, he is not free, he keeps close to the old and to what is "Russian, exceptional". He is chained by the religion of the people.

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Why is the gospel dearer to us than anything else? Because it is a work of art: it contains parables, it speaks of God's consciousness. How can I like a description of someone walking through the woods and kissing a girl's hand? It's a trifle. The weakness of the upper classes is that they attach importance to these things to justify the life they lead. Man cannot live without art, just as he cannot live without food. But just as it is not good to attach great importance to food and to eat as sweet as possible, so it is with poetry and beauty. The less food there is, the cleaner and better it is, as in the case of art.

"

[About the Koran.] It's a mixture, with dates so unclear, it's incoherent, but everyone says it's wonderful in Arabic. It amazes me that such a large part of humanity is conquered by the Koran.

"

The law of living in love with everyone is good because it can always be fulfilled, even when we don't have time, and when our liver hurts.

"

It's hard to write a biography, it requires artistic talent and you have to get into the soul of the person you're writing about.

"

It is absolutely useless to talk much. Any speech can be shortened, but you have to work hard to say something briefly.

"

I read in Swami Vivekananda * : some people came to a hermit and talked to him about his wife. He asked, “What does my wife mean? I forgot." They explained to him who his wife was. Who is Lev Nikolaevich? To forget your "I". It's an ideal, I must try to forget.

"

I love everything that is accessible to everyone's understanding, everything that is repeated by all the teachers of the world.

"

The Russian language is suitable for precision of expression, but very long words are not beautiful: samootrecenie *, samosoversenstvovanie **. The most beautiful is the French language.

"

Once upon a time, being a vegetarian was a great feat, but now many have stopped eating meat. And just as simple, of course, is not to argue.

"

I still don't know how to do good, and it's about time.

"

The kingdom of God is won by effort. I know from my own experience, to always keep God in you, to keep Him in mind permanently, we have to make efforts, practice...

"

Love without non-resistance is inconceivable... Non-resistance is the indispensable condition of love, and love is the fundamental law of our life.

"

The problem is not in what conditions you live, but to lead a simple life in the conditions you are in. It lies in man's power, he can become free and act upon fellow men even in the worst conditions. But it is not in everyone's power to change the conditions.

"

In your youth you have the desire to resist to change the course of things. In old age you see that you don't have to resist, that everything leads to the increase of love in us.

"

In old age you see that all the evil in the world is perpetuated. In youth, even people with Christian views want to order the lives of others, and the old man sees that this is useless and that we just need to turn away from evil.

"

Anarchism is only the manifestation of Christianity in the political field. The spatial expansion of Christianity is huge, but only a very small part of it coincides with political anarchism.

"

I can't stand representations of Christ, and I don't know any that I like at all. I feel revulsion towards everything.

"

... Not only in Christ, but also in Lao Tzu and Buddha there is non-resistance. Confucius doesn't exist, he says: "If we repay evil with good, what will be the reward for good?"

"

We are used to thinking that life is something in which we can set goals. It's an illusion. It is as if the worker put to work gives work the meaning of life.

"

People who have a frivolous attitude towards religion are further away from religion than atheists. (August 7)

"

We are just as Christians and we don't understand each other. Christ did not help or perform charitable deeds. The apostles did not help, but taught people what life is. I have great respect for people who genuinely help.

"

Lately I've been drifting away from Christianity. All religions decay with time, and all contain what is true, eternal.

"

Mahomedanism is the first protestant religion directed against the church.

"

[About Nietzsche.] I'm surprised that people take him seriously, and he also considered him a philosopher. Nietzsche is the measuring unit of social thought, its level!

"

If I lived another 80 years, I wouldn't be able to say everything attributed to me and what, the faces, I would have said.

"

To be always impartial you should not be human.

"

Children are fresh, they come from God, then we all break down little by little, and then, just as gradually, we straighten up.

"

Violence is terrible, not so much because of its torment, but because it provokes hatred.

"

You live in a world of ideal good, and all around are the government, the revolutionaries, the gross deeds of the people, the ignorance of the spiritual law. In fact, not ignorance, but non-recognition of spiritual principles (of moral principles, of spiritual nature). Like a horse without legs, a bird without wings.

"

If I had any doubts that I was an ordinary man, the scandal that the newspapers made about my name should convince me of it. Would it be possible to imagine such an uproar, as around singers, around a real, serious, great man?

"

Premeditated, premeditated debauchery is vile. Much worse than the most terrible thing imaginable, but done in a fit of passion.

"

How the unseen thing, the one that is most necessary, stirs everywhere. The mind works, and as thoughts are, so will be deeds.

"

Writing is anger. Write for money. Writing how to get by when you don't feel like it is like prostitution, you indulge in debauchery when you don't feel like it.

"

How will a few thousand and tens of thousands organize so many millions of people? Everyone always does it in their own way. The energy must be directed to act on myself, on love, thus I approach the whole world.

"

It's sad that the party that was fighting the revolutionaries is worse than them. Approves executions, the tsar, church rituals.

"

Defining the purpose of art as a slavish imitation of nature is an extreme. Like saying art is writing what's on your mind. There are two extremes. Art must express a certain state, a mood, that's art.

"

Beauty is a meaningless word. There is no beauty in music. What is found in music, in Chopin's, in Hungarian, Tatar, Gypsy, German, Russian folk songs, which every people understands, is the core of true art, that is, the challenge of the state, the feeling that unites all.

"

Art is not only an imitation of nature, but also a relationship that unites everyone. The idea must be deep.

"

Beauty, goodness, truth are the ancient human trinity.

"

Beauty is a false feeling. I don't know what is beautiful. The idea of ​​beauty introduces something false into aesthetics.

"

Landscapes are not art, and portraits only rarely, when they manage to reflect the spiritual side of the personality.

"

Life is movement from childhood to death, perpetual movement, whether we like it or not. And if one side (physical) moves and the other (spiritual) stays still, then suffering occurs.

"

In Russians, drunkenness produces a positive reaction, the drunkard is condemned by everyone.

"

What courage, to be "useful to the people"! I am 80 years old and I do not know how to be useful to the people. Try not to be a jerk. This is good.

"

Religious consciousness must evolve. At a certain stage of evolution, religious doctrine lags behind life.

"

Christ merely spoke the general, inevitable law containing all the conditions proper to all men.

"

Love is the law above all others, which cannot be broken under any circumstances.

"

The serious attitude of man towards man is precious.

"

To ask life to happen what we want is the lowest thing.

"

May our main activity not be preaching, but our inner perfection.

"

Strive to be purer yourself, like the glass of the window through which the divine light shines. Keep yourself clean. Perhaps a little old lady's talk or deed will have a greater effect than preaching to thousands of people. How and by what we act does not depend on our power, but on God's power. Let not my will, but Your will be done, not what I want, but what You want.

"

We cannot unite two arts, poetry and music. I never pay attention to the words when they are sung.

"

It is dangerous to set a visible, determined goal, an ideal to be achieved. We just need to know that there is a path to follow, but I don't know where it will lead... The problem is not getting into a certain situation, but how you fight.

"

Forms change, and slavery and power remain. Naturally, a little weaker.

"

The older I get, the more I dislike it when serious things are made fun of.

"

In youth there is a desire for danger. When it is put to the service of truth, what strength and joy it brings you!

"

All wise men say that we must not talk about bad deeds, and the newspapers write about nothing else.

"

Power is impossible to avoid. For me it is an essential issue. I am aware that any institution represents an inequality. The ideal cannot be reached in anything. State, religious, national unionism is one of the greatest temptations.

"

In making up the Reading Circle, apart from the contributions of Lucy Malory *, who repeats what others have said, I drew nothing from what was written by women. There is no woman who is a philosopher, nor in science any woman who has made discoveries. A woman's purpose is to be a mother. Which doesn't necessarily mean getting married. Just be an honest, decent woman.

"

The Papuan confused me. How do I approach the issue of morality with him? I then thought that the whites are the same, even worse, everything drips from them, the moral doctrine does not penetrate them, it drips.

"

It is necessary to spread the knowledge of the human race so that the baby knows that it is not alone, but also has black brothers.

"

Love begets love. But we don't have to wait for that, but to love even if we are not reciprocated with love. The greatest good is not to be loved, but to love everyone. Then he is a peaceful, happy man.

"

Tall buildings will be viewed in the future as we view pyramids.

"

The beginning of Dostoevsky's novels is always good, but the continuation is an unimaginable absurdity.

"

The artistic image of symbolic Christianity does not arouse my sympathy. It seems to me that her time has passed. Christian art should depict the Christian life, not Christ.

"

When there is food left on the plate, I remember how the Chechens once took a Russian prisoner. For them, redemption is the most important thing, and they wanted to know if the prisoner was noble or not, and he told them that he was a commoner. They didn't feed him for two days and then they gave him an apple. He ate half and kept the other half. Then they decided he was noble.

"

... If people, let's say two people sitting next to each other, belong to two different parties, and their agendas are opposite, then it should be clear to them that the truth is not to be found there.

"

Jews lack the sense of religion. Both the Old Testament and Spinoza's philosophy are devoid of religion.

"

Tchaikovsky has delightful works. Beethoven also has less good works, but the public will always glorify everything composed by Beethoven, they will bring him praise from a preconceived idea. The portrait of me together with Sofia Andreevna painted by Repin is absurd to the point of being ridiculous, but it is a Repin and everyone will declare themselves ecstatic in front of him.

"

I, a sinner, though I do not drink, love drunkards. Those who don't bother with it. If we were to compare their moral state with that of sober, sober people, who aspire to wealth or who are proud, drunkards are superior to them.

"

[About China.] It is a very interesting novel that I don't know how it will end. I'm on the duke, I stop at the most interesting place. China is bound to follow the European path. But everything he has done so far against European civilization is good, very good.

"

Everything that has a great effect on me belongs to me, comes from me. But everything that is foreign to me has a weak effect and easily slips past me.

"

Nothing unites us with other people more than thought.

"

The kingdom of God is a consequence. It cannot be obtained by external means, by propaganda. Of all prejudices, the most harmful is the belief in the possibility of realizing the kingdom of God by external, command-and-control methods.

"

Life is not the effort made in the present. True life is outside of time, of space, though we see it in time and space, as past and future.

"

Raphael, Beethoven, Shakespeare, Dante, Goethe do not correspond to my views on art, because art, and I am not ashamed to admit it, is near and dear to me.

"

Each of us has so many sins, shortcomings, that we do not end them. But we all want to order the good of others. It's a big prejudice.

"

... The life of revolutionaries is obscurity, austerity and self-denial. In the absence of the religious principle, man easily submits to the dominant current.

"

Children are like little wild animals. But here arises the possibility of internal struggle. The sooner we start, the better. Violence, prohibitions inspire fear, we must not use them. That's why I say it's hard with children, it's very easy to use violence, to hit them.

"

People are facing a huge weight that they have to lift. Here, for example, is the table around which we sit. Each of us has the religious conscience, the lever that if we act we will move the table. But we throw down the lever, jump on the table, cling to it with our arms, trying to lift it, and not only do we succeed in nothing, but by our burden we increase its weight. All revolutionaries do this.

"

When the existing order was maintained by hypnosis it could still be perpetuated, but when it is maintained by violence it is not possible.

"

I cure myself of pride, I do not value glory. He who is healthy does not value health, he who is rich does not value wealth. Before, I was looking through the newspapers to see what was written about me. Now I turn my back, rather I look away.

"

You can't even imagine what a benefit it is to lose memory in old age! Mental, religious activity is all the more powerful, energetic, fruitful when the mind is not cluttered with what it once was.

"

It's better to think than talk. Speaking, you are "constrained", you find yourself under the influence of the interlocutor. It's better to write than to talk, when you write you have everyone in mind and explain in detail.

"

Gentlemen with this conviction of theirs that they can help the people are like ticks that would like to heal the man they parasitize.

"

How good it is to be 80 years old! You don't make plans to do one or the other, you just live.

"

Reason favors a good life, good life favors reason.

"

Lack of religious views inevitably brings with it a decay in the arts and philosophy.

"

...It doesn't take you anywhere, everything is inside you, make every effort to perfect yourself, to deepen yourself. Look within yourself, not outside of you. Strain your strength to remove that which hinders the manifestation of Divinity within you. External conditions are the consequences of internal transformations.

"

lately I have an unpleasant feeling towards a man who hates me. I tried to partly overcome this feeling in my thoughts through love. I succeeded. And the thought of that man even arouses love in me.

"

How well I understand Pascal when he said that the difference between life and dream lies only in the fact that the dream does not repeat itself.

"

Civilization, as it is now evolving, as material progress devoid of morals, does not promise anything good. If the good of man was in view, there would be no automobiles. Raising horses from foals and training them are real pleasures... Now the most important thing is for moral progress to reach the material level, and then all material conditions will change. In what way? We cannot predict.

"

Continuous tension is neither possible nor necessary... It is impossible to work on yourself permanently.

"

Smog reduces intellectual capacity. Circulus viciousus.

"

Christ is only a man who made men aware that they are sons of God.

"

The desire to influence others borders on the desire for worldly glory... I must work harder to fight these desires.

"

The desire to live in other people's souls is legitimate.

"

You can write when you have ideas. Chopin seems to have done so. Don't sit down and write to order.

"

Humility is the consciousness of perfection, the example is Pushkin.

"

In my advanced years I see clearly that the only salvation from robberies and murders is kindness.

"

Evil is eradicated by evil before our eyes, and continues to increase, and the method of Jesus is not even tried. No one has tried what I propose. Chances are it will work.

"

The desire to amaze is not a good trait. The artist writes what he thinks necessary and is not interested in the effect. It's a temptation. The thought that you can act like this on people must be kept as far away as possible.

"

... Preaching is a temptation. It is an activity for the sake of consequences. Just like the socialist one, for the constitution. [Man] must direct all his efforts to live well himself, and the fruits, even if he will not see them in this life, will be of the best.

"

In art the most important thing is a sense of measure, which Gorky completely lacks. It's amazing how these glories appear by chance and stay firmly in place, like the old ones, for example Nekrasov, who was never a poet.

"

The most terrible disease is trust in the doctor!

"

... Revolution is the pain of making through which spiritual consciousness is awakened.

"

Freedom in education is very good, but it is a mistake to remove children from the family environment. For a child there is nothing better than family.

"

... One thing I do not dare. To reproach the Russian people, who produce all the things through which we live.

"

I think patriotism will always be stronger than anarchism. I'm really confident about it. How could man renounce the traditions of the environment in which he grew up?

"

... Spirit is real, matter is fiction.

"

... The big city is a tight-rope institution.

"

In the city, people gather only to fool each other, in administrations, banks, commerce, educational institutions...

"

Pushkin's short stories can be learned by heart more easily than his poems.

"

... How wonderful it is not to desire anything external. I want only one thing, even when I ride: moral perfection, which partly depends on me.

"

... The essence of life is God. God manifests in the soul through love. Thus, He manifests in me and in other people, and this unites us.

"

Man must be educated in the spirit, the ideal cannot exist in the body.

"

The old man that I am sees time in two ways. It passes quickly if I'm dealing with something external, it passes meet if I'm dealing with inner work.

"

In the doctrine of Confucius there are so many profound ideas and they are expressed so stupidly, obscurely.

"

Christ said that we must learn from children, they are pleased only with kindness.

"

We don't need to increase our income, we need to live more simply. It's easy for a single person, it's hard for a person with a family.

"

Life is only self-fulfilment. The Christian cannot be reconciled to himself (like the Mohammedan or the Jew who fulfill the commandments of their religion), he cannot be holy, neither was Christ himself. The Christian can only aim at the ideal.

"

Public opinion is the opinion of the majority, and the majority is always stupid. The mob inspires us with respect when several people say the same thing. We think there must be something wise in the middle…

"

God is only the object of the religious idea, not the religious idea.

"

The ideal is righteousness, and you, by the mere fact of speaking, are already deviating from it.

"

The purity of the soul, the ability to receive the Divine exists in all the Russian people, even in vagabonds.

"

It is strange that the people like the Psalter, which is decadent poetry.

"

What a great truth that illness is for the good of man! It's better to be sick than to have your tail up.

"

As sickness is for the good of man, money harms him. Live your life and you will see that it is so.

"

I was brought up to respect superiors, I broke that rule all my life and still kept my reflexes. Lately, I've been breaking it. I know them all. Good-for-nothing people.

"

Suvorin * is dirty, but famous, and Skovoroda ** is unknown. Skovoroda is a wise writer whose influence spreads over time, over a long time. It will become more and more known here and will be translated into foreign languages, that's how it will be, I want it to be that way...

"

Our true pity is directed only towards people, when we deal with animals it is only a reflex of pity towards people. Our compassion towards animals must increase, and it (how can we not know this, it's obvious to me) will influence the relationships between people.

"

Equality is possible when there is humility and man wants to be lower than the lowest, not when there is arrogance and man wants to be equal to the superiors, envying them. One of the greatest sins of the world today is the arrogance that we, the so-called educated people, can help the people.

"

The strong points of the Germans are militarism, Wilhelm * and mustaches, but the weak ones coincide with ours: socialism, the proletariat, hatred of the surrounding peoples. When their arrangement will be destroyed and what happened to us will happen to them.

"

No amount of ministers and kings can build that good social order which unifying faith brings. The Russian people have not yet reached it. The disorder, the anarchy, the possibility of doing anything, the murders will not stop until the union in faith begins.

"

In Kant there are no contradictions. By proving that the external world is illusory, he emphasizes the foundation of life.

"

In your youth you get angry, you judge, you are envious, you are consumed by passions. All these leave you in old age.

"

The candle lights without its will. Likewise man, becoming better, shines around him. God made man to influence others as he perfects himself.

"

... And my memory is failing. I don't regret it at all. As the burden of knowledge, the baggage of memory decreases, the dynamics of thoughts does not decrease, but on the contrary, it becomes clearer.

"

Chinese maximums are not as accurate as European ones.

"

In essence, all these pages of the Gospel are of no importance. Those who do not want to know the truth will not be convinced by them, those who have not already been conquered by the truth do not need these pages.

"

I know, I feel sorry for killing even the bugs. They are trapped, I feel sorry for them. Mosquitoes are small, but I don't feel sorry for them. But when I remember, I don't kill them.

"

Living before God is not living before a God in heaven. It means awakening the God in us and living before him.

"

Soldiering awakens the need for patriotism that justifies the villainy of soldiering. Patriotism awakens the need for the soldier who supports patriotism.

"

We can have God consciousness within ourselves. When you have His consciousness in you, you have consciousness in other creatures (and, very vividly, in people). When you have His consciousness in yourself and in other beings, you have His consciousness in Himself.

"

I have lost the memory of all, almost all of my past, of all my writings, of all that brought me to the consciousness with which I now live. Before, I could never think of that state in which I have in mind at every moment my spiritual "I" and its demands which now guide me almost always. I feel this state effortlessly.

"

Only God really exists. Man is His manifestation in matter, time and space. The more the manifestation of God in man (life) unites with the manifestations (lives) in other creatures, the more fully man lives. The union of his life with the lives of other creatures is accomplished through love.

"

We know God only by having the consciousness of his manifestation in us. Everything that derives from this consciousness is always useful to man in knowing God, and in leading a life based on this consciousness.

"

Everything is for the good of others, and especially for my own good. (November 3. Astapovo*)

"

Each must quietly and wisely discern what he is given to do. There are so many things to do around that you can never do them all.

"

The Duhobors * began with the burning of arms, and the revolutionaries with the purchase of bombs and brownings.

"

Society is established by consensus without violence, the state is established by violence.

"

To act in the field of ideas you have to follow an idea. Every man has a nuance, his point of view. And this (joining against your conviction to the conviction of another) is a voluntary slavery, worse than the former slavery.

"

The curse of famous writers is that everything they write is taken for granted.

"

The taste of wine is pleasant, the hangover is unpleasant.

"

A good woman is better than the best man, a bad woman is worse than the worst man.

"

The bombings are the indication of hatred towards power, towards power in general and towards the rich. It is a sign that life organized by violence, by force lived its living. (How Slavery Lived.)

"

How imposing is the written word! I read it and give it more importance than vorbei, but the reasons why he [the author] writes and why people talk are important. Here's what's important.

"

The disease of old age is the forgetting of recent things. But the quintessence of what has been experienced is remembered.

"

... In everyday life we ​​have to change things that seem trivial. Here, I now go to my office and if I am not disturbed and do not judge you, I say to myself "Thank God" and I feel happy, I feel good. But if I lose my patience, I am unhappy with myself. To become better is the only joy, the only (possible) good.

"

As each man will pay for his sins, so will the nation. They bought the niggers, they enslaved them, and now they have the nigger problem, and they think it's a complicated problem.

"

Religious feeling needs quiet.

"

Consciousness changes. Everything tends towards union.

"

When we read parables to them, their [children's] attention is captivated more by the parable-story than by the moral truth that the parable explains.

"

In the conditions of this lack of moral principles, when it is preached that anyone can be killed, I am not surprised that people are killed, but that little is killed.

"

Humility, modesty are now forgotten, everyone considers themselves creators of destinies.

"

What a pity that mental and moral activity has become money-making!

"

Moses did not enter Canaan. And so it is. In material activity, man wants to see, and sees, the reward. In the spiritual, the reward is the activity itself, the planting of the seeds, but we don't have to see the fruits (nor do we need to see them).

"

My memory has warped, it's falling apart, but I wouldn't give up the person I used to be, the one with the good memory.

"

For the first time I clearly understood the importance of living in the present: to avoid everything I do and think with the future in mind: games, fortune-telling, concern for the impressions my actions leave, and above all I understood the importance of what , every moment, it is and must be good, because it is in my power to feel what is happening as an inner process. I have tried several times and each time with success.

"

Knowledge and science are different things. Knowledge is everything, science is a fragment. Just like the difference between religion and church.

"

If there is a God, it is only the one I know in myself, as myself, and in all living things. Matter is said not to exist. No, it exists, but it is only the means by which God is not dead or nothing, but is the living God. Matter is the way through which He lives in me and in everything. Why, I don't know, but I know it is.

"

I must remember that my soul is not something, as they say, divine, but is God himself. As soon as I, God, have self-consciousness, there is no more evil, no death, nothing but joy.

"

I am in a bad mood: nothing is good, everything is bothering me, nothing is as I would like. and behold, I remember that my life is nothing but the release of what hides me from myself, and immediately everything falls into place. Everything that tormented me seems like a trifle, that thing that is life and gives you its joy appears before me. It's enough to reach out. Trouble is replaced by a quiet return to myself, and everything that tormented me becomes material to process. And processing is always possible and always gives me the greatest joy of life.

"

What a terrible poison to the mind is contemporary literature, especially to the youth of the people! First, they cloud their memory with the vague, confident, empty chatter of those who write for contemporaneity. The greatest evil of this talk is that it is made up of allusions, quotations from the most diverse, newest and oldest writers. The words of Plato, Hegel, Darwin are quoted, about which the writers have not even the faintest idea, alongside the words of a Gorky, Andreev, Artabasev and others, about which we don't even deserve to have an idea. In the second place, this talk is harmful because it imposes on the mind and leaves neither room nor leisure for the knowledge of the ancient writers, who have endured for thousands of years, not just ten or a hundred.

"

God breathes through our lives. I can tell myself in my wandering that I am me and God is separate or does not exist, or I can understand that I am Him, and then everything is easy and full of joy and freedom.

"

God breathes through our lives and through all the lives of the world. He and I are one and the same. As I understood this, I became God.

"

The materialistic explanation of life is an absolute consequence of culture, just like the invention of perpetual motion machines (I receive letters from peasants with such projects). Perpetuum mobile is the consequence of mechanical culture, the materialistic explanation of life is the consequence of philosophical culture. "Just smear it with tar or oil and it will keep going."

"

God breathes through us and is kind. His main characteristic is goodness. We understand it well. We seek the good, our whole life is this search, and therefore, whether we like it or not, our whole life is the search for God.

"

If we seek the good for ourselves, for our bodily "I", we will not find it. Instead of good we will find trouble, evil, but our mistakes, through their various consequences, lead to the good of other people in future generations. So the life of all men is always the pursuit of good and the attainment of it; only in the case of a false life is the pursuit of good for other people, for everyone but ourselves. If we lead a righteous life, we also achieve good for ourselves. If we seek God, we find good. If we seek the true good, we find God. Love is only the desire for good. The main theme of everything that exists is good. And that is why it is more correct to say that God is good, than that God is love.

"

I have often said to myself that when I meet, when I talk with any man I must remember that before me is the manifestation of the supreme spiritual principle, and deal with him accordingly. To remember is to be self-aware, that is, to awaken the God within you. And if you have already awakened Him, you will no longer treat Him badly, God is in you, so everything will be fine.

"

Music, like any other art, but especially music arouses the desire for all or as many people as possible to share in the enjoyment you feel. Nothing shows more clearly than this the true meaning of art, you transpose yourself into others, you would like to feel through them.

"

Walking, I felt with all clarity and acuteness the life of calves, sheep, moles, trees, each tree rooted in its own way does its job, put forth an elder over the summer. The seed gave birth to a log, the acorn turned into a tree, into an oak tree, the trees grow, they will last for hundreds of years and they will give birth to other trees, the same with the sheep, with the moles, with the people. And this has happened for an infinite number of years and will continue to do so for an infinite time. It happens in Africa, in India, in Australia, and on every patch of the globe. And there are thousands, millions of globes like this. And behold, when you clearly understand this, how ridiculous is talk of the greatness of anything human or of man himself. Of the beings we know, yes, man is above all, but just as below man there is an infinity of inferior beings whom we know only in part, so above man there must be an infinity of superior beings, which we have no way of knowing. As things stand, it is ridiculous to talk about the greatness of man. All we can want from people is that they don't do stupid things. Yes, that's all.

"

God breathes through us and is good. We seek the good, that is, we want, we do not want, we seek God. But if we seek good for ourselves (for our body, for our person), we will not find it, but through our involuntary example, through its consequences, we serve the good of other people (see competition, technical and scientific improvements, religious wanderings). But if we are aware that we are God, seeking the good of all (love), we find our good. If we seek God, we find good, if we seek true good, we find God. Yes, love is the pursuit of good. The first is not love, but goodness. It is truer to say that God is good than that God is love.

"

Man is aware of the fact that his life has always existed, no, not always, because "always" indicates time, and what is, simply is, but since there has been only one thing exists. My body came from my mother's womb, but I am something else entirely.

"

People who express their beliefs are often accused of not living up to them, and therefore their beliefs are not sincere. But if you think seriously, you understand that it is exactly the other way around. Can the intelligent man who has beliefs that do not correspond to his way of life ignore this contradiction? If he still expresses his beliefs, even when they do not correspond to his way of life, this only proves that he is so sincere that he cannot help expressing that which reveals his weaknesses, and he does not act like the majority, he does not adjust his beliefs according to weaknesses .

"

Religion is the establishment of our relationship with the world, it guides us in all our actions. Usually, people establish a relationship with the beginning of everything, with God, and attribute to this God everything that is human: punishments, rewards, the desire to be respected, love, which is essentially just a human attribute, so that no longer I'm talking about the absurd legends in which God is described as a man. He was forgetting that we can accept, rather we cannot not accept, the beginning of everything, but we cannot form an idea about this beginning. But we invent our human God and behave familiarly with him by attributing our attributes to him. This familiarity, this minimization of God, most perverts the religious conception of men and, to a great extent, lacks any religion, the control of facts. In order to establish such a religion, it is best to leave God alone, apart from the creation of heaven and hell, let us not attribute to him anger, the desire to atone for sins and other such nonsense, let us not attribute to him any will , no desires and not even love. Let's leave God alone, understanding that he is incomprehensible to us, and build our religion, our relationship with the world, based on those qualities of mind and love that we have. This religion will be the same religion of truth and love as all religions in their true sense, from the Brahmins to Christ, but it will be more precise, clearer, more binding.

"

For any man who understands God as he can and as he should, what a terrible sacrilege it is to see that the Jew Jesus is the only [man] recognized as God!

"

The body? Why is there a body? Why does space, time, causality exist? But the very question "why?" is a causal question. Why the body exists is a mystery and will remain a mystery.

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The question is not why I live, but what I must do.

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Our purpose here is to remain as a tool with which the master does something I cannot understand. We must stay at our best, if I am a plough, my edge must be sharp, if I am a torch, nothing must stop me from burning. But we don't know what will happen to our lives, and we don't need to.

"

The understanding of God even in its crudest form, which of course does not correspond to a wise image of him, is nevertheless useful for life, if only because his image, even crude, transfers the consciousness to an area from which the purpose can be seen man, and thus all his deviations, mistakes, sins become clear.

"

The love of children, husbands, brothers is a small example of the love that must, and can, be towards everything.

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We must be like a lamp, closed to outside influences, wind, insects, and at the same time be clean, transparent, burn brightly.

"

When you are alone with yourself, it is good to get used to not doing things that you would not do in the presence of others: not to kill a fly, not to be angry with a horse...etc., and in the presence of people it is good to do things for which you know you will be judged, but which you do not consider bad.

"

God is that spiritual principle in itself *, boundless, which I consider my "self" and which I recognize in all living things.

"

Instead of learning to live in love, people learn to fly. He flies badly, but, just to learn how to fly, he stops learning to live his life in love. It's like if birds stopped flying and learned to run or build bicycles and ride them.

"

It is clear to me that neither my walking, nor my bodily movement, nor my thoughts represent life. What is life? I know only one answer: life is the liberation of the spiritual principle of the soul from the body that confines it. And that is why it is clear that those conditions that we consider catastrophes, misfortunes about which we say: this is not life (as I used to say and believed about my situation), they are precisely life or, in the last instance, its possibility. Only in those situations that we call catastrophes and in which the struggle between soul and body begins, only then does real life, life itself, become possible, if we struggle being aware of it, i.e. the soul conquers the body.

"

Living in time and space enables me to become aware of my timelessness and spirituality, that is, my independence from time and space.

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If there were no motion in time and matter in space, I would not be aware that I am incorporeal and timeless: there would be no consciousness.

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Only with the consciousness of my unchanging, noncorporeal "I" can I understand body, movement, time, space. And only the displacement of matter in time and space enables me to have self-awareness. One determines the other.

"

The outside world is matter in motion. For the movement of matter to exist, the separation of material objects is indispensable, and this separation exists primarily in me. I am separate from the whole world, and therefore I recognize the separateness of other beings from each other, as well as their separateness from the whole world. The relations between material objects are established by spatial measures, the relations between the displacements of separate objects are established by temporal measures.

"

Men gifted with reason and conscience to that divine principle within them which unites them, instead of developing this principle, they want to move faster than horses, deer, fly like birds, they stifle what has been given to them for their good and they strive to develop what they have not been given and do not need. Amazing!

"

At first it seems to you that the "I", the ego, is moving along with the whole world, but the longer you live, the clearer it is that I am not moving, like me, my true "I" is motionless, it is outside of time, and the whole world passes by this "I", along with my balding, toothless, emaciated body. The whole world passes by "I" freeing it from the illusion of life in time.

"

The more aware man is of his spirituality, the more clearly he understands the illusion of apparent movement in time.

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The notion of sin, acting and refraining from acting not for worldly gain or glory, but because you fear sin, these are the necessary conditions of a true, wise, good life. Those who live without having the notion of sin and without refraining from committing it live an animal life. This is how all supposedly educated people live.

"

Life without understanding its meaning, that is, without religion, is what is called madness. When insanity becomes widespread until it reaches a large number of people, it manifests itself with impudence and reaches the highest degree of self-confidence. And then people in all minds are considered insane and are sent behind bars or executed.

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Just as everything material tends to unite, according to the law of attraction, so also everything spiritual tends to unite, according to the law of love.

"

I died, and my spirit ceased to live in my body, but my real "I", my spirit, lives and will continue to live in other beings who understood me and understand me. "But this will no longer be your spirit," it says. "That's exactly what's good, in what will remain to live after me, my person is no longer involved", I answer. The person stands in the way of merging my soul with the whole. And after death my spirit will remain, not my person.

"

Materialists bluntly say that through their experimental scientific research they have explained everything and reduced it to general laws. There remained only one insignificant psychic phenomenon which had not been reduced to an explanation based on experiment, but that was delaying us *. Amazing stupidity or rather madness, but with all due respect we can say, they went crazy! Everything that is the basis of life, everything that means life and should be the cornerstone of any study, is left outside in the hope that in the coming days it will be explained by this professor in Berlin or Hamburg. Amazing!

"

Ah, if only I could always remember, when I am in front of a man, that I am right in front of God, in front of his supreme manifestation that is accessible to me.

"

Consciousness, the essence of consciousness is incomprehensible, insurmountable, it is what we call spirit, soul. Consciousness is contained in a part of matter, that matter which is our body. Consciousness knows the surrounding world through the extreme relations (of organs) with other bodies and the rest of matter. That is the essence of human life.

"

We always procrastinate. It means that time is our form of reception and we want to free ourselves from this form that constrains us.

"

Yes, at first it seemed to me that the world was moving in time and I was moving with it, but the older I get and the more my life becomes a spiritual life, the clearer it becomes to me that the world is moving again you stay put. Sometimes you see it clearly, sometimes you fall back into the illusion that you are moving through time. But if you understand that you are immobile, independent of time, you understand not only that it is the world that moves and you stay still, but also that, together with the world, your body also transforms: you turn gray, your teeth fall out, you lose weight, you get sick, but all this happens with your body, with what is not you. And you are the same, always the same: the eight-year-old and the 82-year-old. And the more acutely you are aware of this fact, the more life is transferred outside of you, into the souls of other people.

"

... The self remains still, but it is liberated, that is, it goes through the process of liberation, which inevitably takes place over time. Yes, that removal of the veils which is liberation takes place over time, but the "I" remains still. The liberation of consciousness unfolds over time: it was greater and becomes less, or it was less and becomes greater. But consciousness is one, it is unchanging and it alone exists.

"

If my memory had remained intact, would I have been able to direct my spirit's attention more fully to consciousness and self-enquiry?

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Pride, the desire for worldly glory, is based on the ability to transpose yourself into the thoughts and feelings of other people. If man lives only the carnal, selfish life, this capacity will be used by him also for himself, so that, divining the thoughts and feelings of others, he may arouse praise and love towards him. But in the man who lives the spiritual life this capacity will only arouse pity for others, the knowledge of the things he can do to serve people, will arouse in him love. I, thank God, feel it.

"

I have never felt a hundredth of the compassion, the compassion to the point of pain, to tears, that I feel now when I try even in a small way to live only for the soul, for God.

"

Today, September 5, 1910, I clearly understood the meaning of matter, space, movement, time. Space is the measure of matter, time is the measure of motion. If I say that matter is hard, I am only saying that it is harder than something less hard. Iron is stronger than stone, stone than wood, wood than clay, clay than water, water than air, air than ether, ether than what? All these measures of strength against the zero strength that I know is within me. Same with space. Sirius is further than the sun, the sun than the earth, the earth than the moon, the moon, than Siberia, Siberia than Moscow, and so on to my hand, my body, the zero distance that I know is in me. Same with movement, time. The primordial geological minerals are earlier than plants, plants than animals, animals than man, Egyptians than Jews, Jews than Greeks, and so on to the zero of time in me, and to the zero of time movement that I know is in me. And that is why only what is immaterial, nonspatial and immovable, that is, timeless, exists and is real. And this is what I am aware that I am. (I expressed myself badly, but it's okay.)

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Motherhood is not the supreme purpose of a woman.

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The worst man is the one who thinks he understands everything. He is a certain type of man.

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To think and say that the world came about through evolution or that it was made by God in six days is equally stupid. The first statement is more stupid though. And only one thing is wise: I don't know, I can't know and I don't need to know.

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There is only one thing we know with certainty, the only thing indisputable and which we know above all, our "I", our soul, that is, the non-corporeal power connected to our body. Therefore, any definition of anything in life, any knowledge is based on this unique and common knowledge of all people.

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Progress is not important for each individual, nor for the human species, because it takes place in time, which is infinite. Progress in time is only the indispensable condition that makes possible the consciousness of the good of perfection.

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The faith of men is but prejudice. People prefer faith to conscience, because the former is more determined and easier, as determined and easy as the observance of a custom and quickly turns into a habit, but faith itself is unstable, unstable and does not lead to the evolution of the spiritual life . It is always immovable and fiery, it provokes the desire of people to communicate, and it cannot be otherwise, since it is based on the common opinion and the more people share it, the more determined it is. Faith is a worldly thing, a comfortable condition for carnal life. The consciousness of God belongs to the soul, it is an indispensable condition for a wise, good life. Faith is always stationary *, consciousness is always in motion. For the faithful, the movement of life unfolds in the corporeal realm, for those who have consciousness, in the spiritual realm.

"

You wonder how to understand a word or another from the Gospels, Revelation or the Bible, finding in these words something either contradictory, or unclear, or even absurd. To this uncertainty I answer: you must read the Gospel and all the books known as Holy Scripture and analyze their contents just as we analyze the contents of all the books we read, and therefore if you come across something contradictory, unclear or absurd, do not look for explanations, but move on, giving importance and meaning only to those things that correspond to common sense and especially to your conscience. Only if you have this attitude towards the so-called Holy Scripture, reading it and especially the Gospel can be useful.

"

Science is the nursing home or rather the realm of success for the mob, and it is open to the most intellectually and morally obtuse of men. In dealing with science, a man may not be aware of what he is doing, counting beetles or enumerating books and transcribing from them what corresponds to a chosen subject, he may not think at all or invent some theory in that dead and useless field, and to be fully convinced that he is doing the most important job in the world.

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There is an eternal, human law of love, and prejudiced scientists, studying animals, have discovered the law of struggle and attribute it to human life. What a lie!

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Man has the consciousness that he is God and he is right, because God is in him. He is aware that he is a pig, and again he is right, because the pig is also in him. But he is sorely mistaken when he imagines that the pig within himself is God.

"

Baba says that man and the world were created by Our Father the Heavenly King, and the learned teacher says that the origin of man is the result of the struggle for survival between species and that the world is also the result of evolution. The difference between these conceptions, obviously in favor of the grandmother, is that, through her words about the creation of Our Father, the Heavenly King, sees in the creation of man, of his soul, and in the creation of the world something incomprehensible, inconceivable for the human mind. But, by his petty observations and conclusions, the learned teacher wants to mask that fundamental, incomprehensible and inconceivable thing, which must be recognized and separated from what is clear and accessible in order for these clear and accessible things to really be as I am.

"

We do not recognize the law of love that is proper to man. It was revealed to us by the greatest sages of the world and we know it well in our souls. But because we do not see it applied in the material world, but instead we see, we see, the law of struggle (proper to animals), we recognize it and attribute it to man. What a terrible mistake! And that is precisely the conception of the world that the most enlightened people have.

"

I would do well to ask myself the question: would you accept to be condemned and despised by all for doing what you consider to be God's work, your purpose, not to mention your personal happiness? It would be good to ask myself and answer: yes, but fortunately it did not happen and cannot happen that the man who does God's work does not find understanding in anyone.

"

Habit is a big thing. Habit makes the deeds that once required effort every time, a struggle between the spiritual and the animal, no longer require effort and attention, and the effort and attention can be used for other purposes. It is the mortar that strengthens the laid stones so that others can be placed on top of them. But the same good part of habit can become the source of immorality, when the animal wins in battle: eating people, torturing, fighting, owning land, using prostitution, etc.

"

Yes, faith, prejudice, fanaticism gives the great force of self-denial. But this happens because one goal is established, the main goal of life and the most accessible, the one that brings with it the fulfillment of the law of life: obedience to the laws of the church, castration, burning your being, destroying the unbelievers and others. Without religion, without prejudices, for the fulfillment of God's law, you don't have to do something specific, something determined, but the most important problems of life are solved by the law of God's love, by the law of love. And such a preoccupation does not bring with it manifestations as fiery as the first.

"

The greater the self-denial, the harder it is to remain humble, and vice versa.

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The words of a dying person take on special importance. But we die day by day and most obviously in old age. Let the old man remember that his words can have a special meaning.

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What audacity or terrible madness or rather astonishing of the missionaries who, in order to civilize them, to enlighten the "savages", teach them their church faith.

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What we call the world consists of two parts, consciousness and the things we are aware of. If there were no consciousness there would be no world either, but we cannot say that if there were no world there would be no consciousness either. (Is that so?)

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You often say that you cannot talk to a man about things that are not accessible to him, but in fact you do not hold back, and often you waste absolutely useless words and get irritated because he does not understand you who cannot understand you.

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The selfish life is irrational, animalistic. Such is the life of children and non-reproducing animals. But for the mature man who has reason, the selfish life is unnatural, it is foolishness. In the same situation are many women who have lived from childhood a justified selfish life, then family selfishness through animal love, then selfish domestic love, then motherhood, and then, when they are left without family life, without children, they retain only reason, but without total love, and is in the condition of an animal. It's a terrible and widespread situation.

"

You want to serve others, the worker wants to work. But to work usefully, you must have tools, and it is not enough to have them, they must also be good. What are you, with all your qualities, character, habits, knowledge, are you a good tool to serve people? You must not serve men, but God, and His service is clear, precise. It means increasing the love in you. By increasing the love within you, you cannot but serve people, and you will serve in such a way that it will benefit you and people and God.

"

Unhappy is not the one who is in pain, but the one who wants to cause pain to another.

"

Every human being is always in a process of growth, therefore we cannot reject it. But there are some who are so alien, so distant in their condition, that you cannot speak to them other than to children, loving them, respecting them, protecting them, but without putting yourself on an equal footing with them, without to ask them to understand what they cannot understand. One thing makes it difficult to communicate with them, the fact that instead of the desire for knowledge, the sincerity that children have, these other children are indifferent, they deny what they don't understand and above all they are very confident.

"

Rarely have I met a man more gifted with all the faults that I am: voluptuousness, cupidity, malice, arrogance and above all selfishness. I thank God that I know this, I have seen and see this wickedness in myself and I am fighting it. This explains the success of my writings.

"

...This ignorance is strong and incurable because people don't see it, don't want to, can't see it. And they don't want to, they can't see it because they are very satisfied with themselves, with their situation. We evolve, we progress. We have airplanes, submarines... What else do you want? Give us a deadline and everything will be great. And even so, non-thinkers can't help but be excited about airplanes and all that. There is a reason why all of this came about. They came about because the 99%, who are slaves, do what the 1% command, and it's true that miracles happen. And people really believe that these miracles are necessary and therefore they cannot, they do not want to change the life that produces such miracles. Miracles are the basis of the bad life. Bad life produces miracles. Can you improve life by continuing to live badly? Only one thing is necessary, to put the moral requirements first, because if you put the moral requirements first, the airplanes will immediately disappear and...

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It's hard to imagine the turn that people's material life will take if they stop living the vicious, animal life, even if they don't start living according to love.

"

If we are to talk about God the Creator, then the God who, according to their conception, made man, the man who cannot understand Him otherwise than within the limits of space and time, this God, according to their conception, is also in space and time, i.e. it is omnipresent (in space), eternal (in time). Very good.

"

At first it seems that living only before God is something uncertain, petty, artificial, unnatural. But just try to live like this and you will see how easy, certain and natural it is. For that is how everything is. Isn't life given to man in time so that he can affirm himself by living in God? Isn't it the same when people live only before people: politicians, scientists, artists? No matter how vain these concerns, no matter how doubtful their results, people devote their whole lives to them. Then how can you not give your life to a soul concern that always bears fruit, is free and rewarding?

"

How easy it is to forgive the one who repents, the humble one, and how hard it is to suppress in new grudges *, the lack of goodwill towards the one who offended us, the confident, self-satisfied! But above all, we must learn to forgive them.

"

Love is the awareness that you are a manifestation of the Whole, of your union with the Whole, love for God and fellow human beings.

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It is enough to become aware of the fact that you are humble and immediately you cease to be humble.

"

At night I prayed my favorite prayer of late: Lord, help me to live independently of people's judgment, only before You, with You and through You.

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"Help me, Lord, to live only by Your will." What does this mean? It means, first of all, that I am a man who can only think within the limits of space and time, unwittingly imagining the invisible Principle that gives life to everything, otherwise it cannot be, secondly, that I want nothing else or that more than anything I want to unite with this Principle, that I want to remove everything that prevents this union.

"

In me is the principle of all life. I know this not because I have studied the world, but because I feel the whole world, I live through the whole world, only I live through the whole world, and I feel it being aware that I am limited by space and time. Me, within the limits of my body, I feel clear, others, less clear, but even less clear the people separated from me by time and space, but I don't limit myself to knowing that they exist, I feel them. Animals feel less clearly, and inanimate objects still less. But all this I not only know, but also feel through that single principle which gave life to the whole world.

"

To rise to the point where you can see yourself. That's all.

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What we call reality is a lifelong dream from which we gradually awaken in old age (awaken to be aware of a truer reality) and fully awaken through death.

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When you talk to a man, he doesn't have to see that you love him, but you have to feel the real love. (It's very important.)

"

For the first time I acutely feel how random this world is. Why do I, who am so clear, simple, thoughtful, good, live in this messed up, complicated, crazy, bad world? Why?

"

Yes, we have to learn to love like you learn to play the violin. But what can we do if everything about that man seems disgusting to us, and he is also full of himself? We are tempted to despise him, and that would be contrary to love. Should we avoid it? Yes, but we must be ready to love him. And for this we need: 1) to carefully investigate whether the cause of our disgust is something personal, an insult to pride or something similar; 2) not to remember or think about him anything unkind.

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What will be after death is not given to us to know. But what is good, we can and do know.

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What is natural is that civilized people cover their bodies, especially women, leaving only what bears the seal of spirituality, the face, exposed. The baring of the body is now an indication of the fall. It should be the same for men.

"

I would like to pray only when I am in a good state of mind, with an open heart and ready to pray. And I try to pray: help me to be with You, to fulfill Your work, to defeat all the evil in me. But I think about things I don't need and I realize that I have nothing more to ask for, that I have been given everything I can ask for and I have everything. I can only say thank you.

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True religion is first and foremost the pursuit of religion.

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To think that we can live without error, without sin, is a great and dangerous error.

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We are given one thing, which no one can take away from us, the good of love. Enough to love and everything becomes joy: the sky, the trees, the people, even yourself. And we look for good everywhere, not only in love. This pursuit of good in riches, power, glory, exclusive love not only does not bring good, it certainly lacks it.

"

How funny it is to imagine that matter is the clearest thing and the foundation of everything, when in fact matter is only a means of communication of the spiritual principle itself, from which emanated everything that is separate (that's what I called it at the beginning ). I should add that matter is a means of communication of the spiritual principle itself (from which emanated all that is separate) only in tandem with movement.

"

Just as there is no clear separation between dreaming and waking, so there is no separation between the thoughtful and the mindless life. A greater rapprochement between dream and wakefulness and between thoughtful and mindless life is achieved by the more or less sudden awakening of consciousness, therefore moral effort is possible.

"

The man who does not live for himself, but for the fulfillment of God's law, apart from the visible consequences of his good work, also causes infinitely important consequences that he does not see. Just like the bee that, collecting honey for its fellows, pollinates the plants that are needed not only by its own species, but also by thousands of other species.

"

Walking, I pluck some lovely flowers and throw them away. There are so many. So it is with the wonderful spiritual flowers of life. We don't value them precisely because there are so many of them.

"

Three prayers for every hour: 1) I want to live only for You and before You, 2) to live now, in the present, through love and 3) thank you for everything I did not deserve and am not worthy to have received. I thought of these prayers as I walked through the woods, lost my way, and became afraid. And I remembered my prayers. Yes, I am with You, and now I think only that I want to be with You, I am glad and thankful that I lost my way - and immediately I felt good.

"

Separate beings are conscious of their separation through what appears to us as body, matter, which is inconceivable outside of space and motion, outside of time.

"

How strange that people are ashamed of their filth, of cowardice, of a lower rank, but they are not ashamed of anger, but enjoy it, they absorb it to increase it, seeing in it something good.

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What an amazing thing, we understand least what we know best, or we know best what we do not understand at all - our soul and God.

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You can be disappointed in faith. Furthermore, beliefs can be opposed to each other. It is true, however, that they manifest much more visibly than consciousness; instead beliefs are precarious and contradictory, and consciousness is one and unchanging.

"

For the first time I clearly understood the importance of humility for life, for freedom, its joy.

"

Do not expect that, when you are struck on one cheek and offer the other, the one who strikes you will come to his senses, stop beating and understand the meaning of his deed. No, on the contrary, he will think and say: good that I beat him, it is clear that he feels guilty and sees that I am superior to him. But I know that regardless, it's best, for you and for everyone, to turn the other cheek when you're hit. This is "perfect joy". Just make the gesture. And then you will be able to give thanks even for what seems like trouble.

"

I must thank God for the gentleness with which he punished the sins of my youth, and the main sin is my sexual impurity in marriage with a righteous girl. That's right, you scumbag whore. You can only be thankful for the mildness of the punishment. It is easier to bear the punishment when you know why it was given to you.

"

How easy it is to take revenge by deed or word and how hard it is to forgive, but what joy if you succeed. We must strive.

"

The love of God and the consciousness of God are like the gravity of the earth and the attraction of the earth to a greater center, and of that to an even greater center, and so ad infinitum. Love towards fellow humans, towards animals is also an attraction of objects subject to the universal law of gravitation. We know God like we know gravity. As we know gravity by its law, so we know God by His law, the law of love. The law of love of God is like the law of gravitation to the common center of gravity, and the law of attraction between separate material objects is like the law of love between separate living beings. Just as we do not know and cannot even imagine the common center of attraction, so we cannot know or imagine God. But just as this incomprehensible center undoubtedly exists, so also is the existence of God beyond doubt.

"

The devil of pride is so cunning and cunning, that as soon as you begin to judge yourself with the greatest sincerity and see all your wickedness, he is already present and begins to whisper to you: Behold, see how good you are, not as others, you are humble and condemn yourself, you are good.

"

We have been educated to understand through religion a certain exact image of God and His law, therefore we do not accept an incomprehensible but certain God, nor His commandments which are not written in books, but in our hearts. But only in this incomprehensible God and in His commandments written on our hearts is actually religion, the only true religion.

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When you meet a man there should be only a feeling of joy and gratitude because the possibility of union arises.

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Patriotism is impossible for the man who wisely believes in anything at all.

"

Life is so full of contradictions in relation to everything we think and feel that we need the giddiness of tobacco and wine.

"

You judge others without knowing them. And about you how many villains you know and forget about them!

"

The Japanese consider Christianity a feature of civilization. Will they be able to neutralize Christianity, like our Europeans, so that it does not destroy what they take from civilization?

"

The great majority live only an animal life, and in human affairs blindly obey public opinion.

"

We pray in words. And communication with Him, with God, is possible not through words, but only through love.

"

Consciousness awakens us from sleep. So only consciousness (who am I?) awakens us from the false carnal life. The soul is consciousness. It would seem that it is a small conscience. Life is so complicated and tangible, and consciousness so small, so hard to notice. Small and hard to see, but she is Everything. What is consciousness? It is the fact that I will ask myself the question of who and what I am. And I will answer, I am me. But I will ask myself who is this second "I"? The answer is only one: me too, and whenever you ask me too, me. Obviously, the "I" is something outside of space... outside of time... The only thing that really exists. Everything corporeal could have appeared under the conditions of space and time, but not consciousness. And consciousness is everything.

"

One of the main causes of suicides in the European world is the false Christian doctrine of the church about heaven and hell. The world does not believe in heaven and hell, but meanwhile the idea that life must be heaven or hell has been so strongly imprinted on its mind that it does not accept the rational understanding of life as it is, not as heaven or hell, but as struggle, unceasing struggle, unceasing because life means precisely struggle, but not the struggle of the Darwinist theory between beings, between individuals and beings, between individuals, but the struggle of spiritual forces with their bodily limits. Life is the battle between soul and body. Understanding life in this way, suicide is impossible, useless, absurd. The good is only in life. I look for the good. How to leave life to find the good? I'm looking for mushrooms. Mushrooms only grow in the forest. How to get out of the forest to find mushrooms?

"

The only thing that can please me, as a man who lives for his soul, is that I have become less of a villain than I was before. And this is not just a phrase for the sake of the beauty of the idea and the word, but my honest, controllable and real state of mind lately. And the joy of being aware of every progress, no matter how small, is a great joy.

"

Detachment (actions performed mechanically, unconsciously) is the basis of true life, the basis of moral perfection. Life is the striving for perfection. Man's accomplishments add to the domain of what is experienced, of habit, and man makes new efforts to add habits to the sphere of the unconscious. Struggle is always negative. Nor can it be otherwise, since life means liberation. Release takes place. Our life's work is to do nothing that opposes liberation. Therefore the deed is the awareness of life and combating everything that stands in its way. The effort that transforms something done into habit is the most important thing, the only work of life. Without effort, there is no human life, only animal life. Materialists are very right when, speaking of animal life, they reduce it to the struggle for existence and the formation of habits. But if we talk about human life, we have to explain its main quality, striving. What is striving from a materialistic point of view?

"

The longer I live, the less I understand the material world, and on the contrary, I become more and more aware of what is impossible to understand and can only be aware of.

"

The Christian ideal of our time is absolute righteousness. To regard marriage as a holy thing, or even as a good thing, is an abdication of the ideal. Christian devotion, if we accept the religious act of devotion, can be only one, devotion to absolute righteousness, in no case the acceptance of sexual relations, and the oath can be only one for the two spouses, not of faith to each other, but of righteousness, which presupposes faith towards one alone. "And what will happen to the human race then?" I don't know. I only know that, just as for man the animal law of struggle is not binding, on the contrary, so there is the law of love which denies struggle. I also know that the animal law of association is not obligatory for man, but the opposite ideal of righteousness is obligatory. What will come out of this? I do not know. But I know that following the higher aspirations of my being, of love and righteousness, nothing but good can come.

"

It is very important: as the concept of creation entered the minds of people and demanded an answer to the question: how did the world appear in time? - the creation of the world (Darwin) - the same happens with the question about the source of evil (Adam's sin, heredity). Both are gross prejudices. The world did not appear, but I exist.

"

It goes without saying that people could not spoil life, make a good life essentially a bad life. They could only, and have, temporarily ruined the lives of the present generations, instead they have unwittingly introduced into life the element which pushes it rapidly forward. If they have done and are doing the greatest harm by the irreligious perversion of men, they also unwittingly introduce what unites men by their injurious inventions, for themselves and their generations. They corrupt people, but they corrupt everybody, Hindus, Chinese, blacks, everybody. Medieval theology or the depravity of the Romans only perverted their peoples, a small part of humanity. Now, however, electricity, railways, the telegraph, the printing press are perverting everything. All appropriate, they cannot but appropriate everything, and all suffer equally, are forced to change their lives equally, all are forced to change the most important thing in life, their understanding of it, their religion.

"

Cars, to do what? The telegraph (telephone), to transmit what? Schools, universities, academies, to learn what? Meetings to discuss what? Books, newspapers, to spread information about what? Railways to go where? And who goes? Millions of people gathered and subject to one authority, to do what? Hospitals, doctors, pharmacists, to prolong life, but why prolong it?

"

For God's sake, not for His sake, but for your sake, come to your senses. Understand the craziness of your life. At least for an hour detach yourself from the trifles in which you are caught and which seem so important to you: all your millions, your robberies, the premeditation of murders, your parliaments, your sciences, your churches. At least for an hour detach yourself from all this and look at your life, look at yourself, look at your soul that lives in your body for a short and slow time, come to your senses, look at you and at life around you, understand all your madness and shudder. Shudder and seek salvation. [...] Come to your senses for an hour and you will see clearly that the only important thing in life is not something external. We only need what is within ourselves. Only if you understand that you need nothing, absolutely nothing, except one thing: to save your soul, because only in this way can we save the world. Amen.

"

...All because of the terrible, harmful and very widespread prejudice of people who live without faith, the prejudice that people can order their lives, it would be good if it were their lives, but they all order the lives of others, families, social strata, the peoples. This prejudice is horribly damaging because man squanders with the arrangement of his life and that of others that force of the soul given to perfect himself.

"

The prejudice of evil. Evil did not exist. Life is good. Evil, absent good, is only an indication of error. Time exists only for us to see our mistakes and correct them, having the joy (ultimate good) of correcting our mistakes. But if we do not correct our mistakes, they are corrected against our will by death. Yes, life is good, evil does not exist. There are only our faults, the common and the personal. And we are given the joy to, through time, not only correct them, but use the experience of all mankind.

"

How easy it is to acquire what we call civilization for individual men and nations! Finish a university, clean your nails, use the services of a tailor and a barber, travel abroad and here is a civilized man in all his glory. And for the peoples, as many railways, academies, factories, dreadnoughts *, fortresses, newspapers, pariahs, parliaments, and behold the most civilized people. This is why people cling to civilization and not to education, people and nations alike. The first is easily obtained, does not require great efforts and is accepted, the second, on the contrary, requires great efforts and is not only not accepted, but is always despised and hated by most people, because it exposes the lie of civilization.

"

We call evil that which we and our bodies do not like, a bad dog, a bad horse, a bad feather (do not write), a bad children's table because it has struck it, a bad man, a bad God.

"

How good would it be to answer the question: How are you doing with your health? to be able to answer honestly: I don't know, it doesn't concern me.

"

Religious truth presupposes the consciousness of the unseen principle which gives life to all, and the aspiration to fulfill the requirements of that principle. Requirements that can be known by every person and even more so by those in whom this consciousness is alive. It is the same everywhere, the expression of this supreme principle unites people, and those united under the influence of lusts, passions falsify the understanding of this principle and its requirements. Their union is therefore the basis and the cause for not fulfilling the requirements.

"

How difficult, but how good and what a joy it is to live independently of the judgment of people, only before the judgment of your conscience, before God. When I feel that it feels so good!

"

Memory? How often memory is mistaken for intelligence. But it is not observed that memory excludes cleverness, it is incompatible with it, with the cleverness of the original solution of real problems. One replaces the other.

"

I remembered so vividly that at 81 years old I have the same consciousness of "I" as at 5 or 6 years old. Consciousness is immobile. That is why there is that movement we call time. If time passes, there must be something that stands still. The consciousness of my "I" stands still. I would like to say the same about matter and space. If there is something in space, then there must also be something immaterial, nonspatial. I don't yet know to what extent I can make that last statement.

"

Space and matter, time and motion, like number are concepts that we have no right to attribute to phenomena outside of time and space such as soul, God... We cannot say of God that He is one or three (number) , or about the soul that will be or is "in the other world". All these concepts are spatial or temporal and therefore, in relation to something outside of time and space, they have no meaning. We are talking about the life of the soul after death. But if the soul will live after death, then it had to live before life. A one-sided eternity is absurd.

"

If we are to seriously meditate on our life and the life of the whole world, we cannot fail to recognize that there is SOMETHING that cannot be known in any way, and we cannot fail to recognize that it is a special thing, because this something is one and the same and in my soul, and in myself. (It seemed like a novel idea, but what came out sounds boring.)

"

In any kind of occupation it is important to stop in front of what you don't know, and not to think you know what you don't know. But the most important thing is curbing false knowledge in everything related to faith, religion. All the madness of religious prejudice comes from this unrestrainedness.

"

How important it is to remember that we are not asked for perfection, but as close to it in everything (as in my current work), as much as you can. Feci quod potui, faciant meliora potentes *. This is what we must keep in mind.

"

Falling asleep, I lose consciousness of my waking self. Dying, I lose the consciousness of the one who lives this life as himself. But just as, when I fall asleep, the one who has consciousness is not destroyed, so it is when I die. What this thing is that has consciousness I do not know and have no way of knowing. It occurs to me: well, my soul is the one with consciousness, it does not die, but somewhere, someday it will manifest again (all are temporal and spatial concepts). But, without the memory of the previous "me", I am no longer me. My consciousness was destroyed with death. Whatever it is after the death of the "I", of the principle that makes up my "I", I am no longer, will not be, and cannot be. But if so, the question arises: what is this "I" of mine that suddenly appeared at birth? What is this "I"? Why is this "I" me? And how can this "I", which has appeared vaguely out of time, not disappear just as strangely out of time. Okay, I'm going to die. But why will no life after my death be my life? There is something here, but I can't clear it and express it.

"

I thought again about my memory loss. I forgot and am forgetting everything that made me Lev Nikolaevich. What's left? There remains something very important, the most important. Something that manifested at birth in this world, but was not, will not be, but is. And this life of mine is only mine, no doubt mine, but why shouldn't any other life also be mine? I am already aware of this fact through love. It's unclear, but I understand *.

"

People have elevated malice, the spirit of revenge to the rank of a legitimate feeling, of justice, and their own wickedness attributes it to God. How ridiculous!

"

I feel bad living because life is bad. Life is bad because we humans live bad. If we humans lived well, life would be good, and I wouldn't live badly. I am just a man among men. And even if I can't force everyone to live well, I can do it for myself, and so I can make people's lives and mine at least a little better. The confirmation of the correctness of this reasoning is that, if everyone adopted it, then for me and for the rest of the people, life would be good.

"

... Self-denial frees us from sins, humility frees us from temptations, faith frees our minds from prejudices, belief in the truth from false doctrines.

"

I do not exist, only what is in me exists.

"

Some think for themselves, then, when it seems to them that their ideas are new and important, they communicate them to their fellows, others think in order to communicate their ideas to their fellows, and after communicating them, especially if people praise them, they take these ideas as truth.

"

I understand more and more clearly that dreaming and waking, which seemed to me similar to life and death, are more than similar. Just as, waking up, I come to have a clearer, more real consciousness, through what was shown to me in my sleep, the same happens in the case of birth. And just as I remember only a little of what was (?) before birth, so in the waking state I rarely remember what was shown to me in a dream. Just as by falling asleep each day I lose touch with consciousness, so does dying. (The analogy stops at the point where we observe that in sleep we have a lower consciousness, which cannot be true in the case of death.) I lose contact with consciousness, and this loss is not only not a bad thing, but even desirable. Because this loss is rest and preparation for a better life.

"

Suppose we knew nothing of the lives of men in our Christian world, and were told that 99% lead a life of toil and need, while 1% live in luxury and luxury. If we were to ask what the latter's religion, science, and art are like, I think the answer can only be one: their religion, science, and art are perverted and evil.

"

To understand any material object, no matter what, we need to know its origin, the cause of its appearance and its relation to other objects. But the origin and cause of the appearance of any material object is lost in infinite time. Likewise, its relation to other objects is difficult to determine, because all objects decompose into infinitely small objects and expand to infinitely large objects. Therefore, we can know neither the origin nor the cause of the appearance of objects, nor their relation to other objects.

"

The time of existence, not only of my 80-year-old body, but also of our planet, the earth, although it is billions of years, is only an infinitesimal moment of infinite time. That is why the causes of my origin, of the earth and of everything that exists in the world can neither be understood nor known to us. Likewise, the relationship with matter, in space, of my body, the earth and everything you want, is not, if we are talking about the infinite world again, not even a grain of sand, it is nothing. It is not the boundlessness of time and matter in space that is amazing, but what is amazing, I would say, is the infinite stupidity of people who think that material phenomena are easy to understand, who are content to explain life without feeling the need to recognize a spiritual component.

"

God is the Creator, Brahma, Vishnu, Shiva, God Jupiter, God is Christ. All these are nonsense that we reject, we cannot but reject these absurd representations. And we do not think that the notion of God, the spiritual principle of all that exists, is such a great and indispensable notion, that we could not have arrived at with the mind, if it had not been revealed to people gradually through the thinking of the most great sages of the world. This is a giant leap for mankind, and we imagine that with radio, airplanes, electricity, we can do without it. Yes, we can, but only as animals, not as humans, as we already live in our New Yorks, Londons and Pariss with 30-storey blocks of flats.

"

What is the binder that holds my tongue, my heel, my lungs together to make up my body? It is not the degree of closeness: the excrement is closer to me than the skin, and they do not belong to me, while the skin, the ear, the heel, the cells of the body are mine. Their binder is my conscience. Can the universes be connected through consciousness? Perhaps Earth, Mars, the Sun, and many others are united by consciousness, even though to me, with my limited imagination of time and space, it does not seem to me that they can be part of a whole.

"

I forgot all about dessert. How could it be otherwise, when the inner work of self-judgment takes place in me without ceasing, an effort that dominates all my spiritual forces.

"

Faith? What is faith? Faith is that spiritual construction on which the whole human life is based, it is what gives man a point of support and therefore the possibility to move. It is the support of the corporeal being. A hair is enough for an insect, a flower, a leaf for a bee, a branch for a bird, a stump for a squirrel, a tree for a bear. So it is with man's faith. For one it is the icon, for another the mysteries, for the third the prophet, for the fourth the personal God, for the fifth... It all depends on the weight of the demands of his heart and mind.

"

The meaning of life is not measured by time, but by its depth.

"

You think of people, and God thinks of you.

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Pleasure is for the body, good is for the soul. Pleasure and goodness seldom meet.

"

Matter and space, time and motion separate me and every other living being from God the Whole. How then to imagine a personal God, i.e. limited, located in space and time?

"

In all of us there are two "I's", the corporeal one, made up of the union of body and consciousness, so bodily life, and consciousness alone, that is spiritual life. In children, spiritual life manifests itself, when it manifests itself, with all purity, without the participation of the mind and its fruits, temptations, that is why it is so sympathetic.

"

One of two, either we live in time and space, and guide our activity according to what will be and external material conditions, and then we fear, hope, always make mistakes and suffer, or we live only in the present and for the spiritual principle, for soul, and we guide our activity according to the law of the spiritual principle of the soul, love, and then we live without fear, disappointment, mistakes or suffering. Life does not let us live one way or the other to the end. Life is life only if the spiritual principle overcomes matter, and this victory is life itself.

"

The most important thing is that the thoughts are in the present. It is a solid preparation of the facts of life.

"

I do not wish to be a Christian, any more than I would advise anyone to be a Brahmin, Buddhist, Confucianist, Taoist, Mohammedan, etc. We must all find, each one in our faith, what is common to all of us and, giving up what is characteristic only to us, to preserve what we have in common.

"

In all religions there is falsehood and there is truth. Untruths differ, truth is one in all. If only from here you can find out what is true and what is false in each religion.

"

If you see life as something that belongs to you, your life will be constant restlessness, disappointment, bitterness, misery. If you see it as a condition to serve the Master, your life will be peace, contentment, joy and prosperity. Wherever I wake up, that's where the Master sent me. And whatever forces, great or small, spiritual and bodily, I feel in me, all these forces are the tools given by the Master to carry out the work entrusted to me, whether locomotive, ax or broom. But the work which the Master has commanded us to do we find as soon as we cease to be preoccupied with our own self-invented affairs. And there is only one work, the manifestation of love, the merging with all. And this can be done always, everywhere, under the conditions of any forces.

"

What is the "I" of which I have consciousness within me, separate from the Whole? What is that Whole, from which I am conscious of being separate, and what is the relation between 'my self and the Whole? That is, what is meant by the words doctrine of the soul, doctrine of God, and moral doctrine. Without these doctrines of the soul, of the Whole, of morality, there can be neither rational nor moral life, there can be no rational knowledge. And these doctrines are non-existent in our world. Hence our mad life, and the vain exercise of thought which we call true science.

"

I feel good in my soul. And that's only because I pray without ceasing with a new prayer and live by it. Help me to be only Your worker. I know that he can help me, as I can help the cells of my body to serve the whole organism, but I only express in prayer what I feel in my soul. And, amazingly, I'm 81 years old and just beginning to understand life and live.

"

As the axe, the saw, the spade must be sharpened to do the work for which they are intended, so human powers must be loving in order to do what they are meant to do. The laborer with an ax, saw, spade cannot finish the work of the household, and the man who does God's work cannot do it without love. Love is a tool given to man by God to serve Him. But just as the tool, the axe, the saw, the spade must be in good condition, sharpened to cut what it needs to cut, so love must be sharpened so that it can act not only on those close, good, but also on to strangers, evil, on all people, on everything that lives.

"

We are workers in the common, universal work of God. The ways by which this work is done are not accessible to us, just as workers cannot be accessible to all the tasks of the master (the example, of course, is far from complete, comparing the universal, eternal movement with the particular, temporary work). Any attempt by the worker to guess what the master's work consists of is a waste of effort. Making assumptions results in distraction and slows down the completion of the work. And thus the worker will be deprived of the greatest good, the consciousness of the certainty that he is doing what the master wants of him. This consciousness is given to man only in one way. If he deviates from the master's will, the worker deprives himself of good, if he fulfills it, he receives this good.

"

Help me, help me to have the consciousness without ceasing that I am Your worker, even a little, help me not to lose this peace and this joy.

"

Children are especially cute because they always live in the present. Even their dreams are the life lived in the present, they do not break the laws of life.

"

If he does not live religiously, but only for animal needs, the thinking man can become hideous because he does not even have the family and species instincts that the animal has. Hence he becomes selfish, enemy of all. A terrible enemy, because he is armed with those qualities of thought and speech which are indispensable and harmless only in the presence of religion. It is the same as putting a dagger, a gun, or gunpowder in the hands of a child. Such people are also children. We must strive to pity them, to love them. And it's very hard.

"

Remember that the condition of your body, your stomach, appetite or its appeasement, fatigue, illness, all these transform, not transform, but raise to the highest stage or descend to the lowest stage your state of mind, your attitude towards life . When you are in the ecstasy of joy, moved by the goodness of life, when you are sad and melancholy. When you love everyone, when you love no one or at least refrain from loving. Remember this, and do not attribute to that state of elation or depression the importance of your true state. And the true state of your "I" is the central, middle one, the one in which you enjoy the state of elevation, strive to maintain it, do not believe in the state of depression and try to overcome it. It is important that this center point always moves up, never down. Thank God it exists.

"

People who go astray are always more numerous than those who do not go astray at all or go astray only a little. That is why the essential and strongest force is always on the side of the former. In the conditions of the successes of civilization, of the communication channels, of the printing press, especially of the daily press, this power is dying.

"

The more certain we are that absolute perfection is attainable in this life, the harder and less we move to fulfill the greatest and most accessible perfection to us.

"

We always forget that the effort of the soul is not precious and important when you are talking with spiritually close people, but quite the opposite. Only one good, but great and true, was given to man: to have the consciousness that he is the manifestation of God (the spiritual principle). This good consists in the fact that the man with the consciousness that he is the manifestation of God has, through the union with God, everything he wants, does not encounter obstacles and knows without fail that his life has the meaning that he recognizes in it. But the man who has the consciousness that he is a personality does not have and can never have what he wants, meets obstacles everywhere and does not know the meaning of his life, even if even a life like his cannot be without meaning.

"

The movement of the life of one who has the consciousness that he is a spiritual principle is absolutely different from that of the man who believes himself to be a carnal person. For the one who considers himself a spiritual principle, the "I" is immobile, and the rest, including the body, rushes past him. He who has self-awareness stands on the shore, and evil along with everything that floats on the water flows past him. He who believes himself to be a person moves with the whole and is conscious of his movement only because some objects move more slowly and others remain still. He is floating on the river and he knows that he is floating only because some objects float slower than him, the banks remain still, and he knows that he is floating towards death, towards destruction.

"

I felt acutely what I had known for a long time: everyone has the consciousness of his "I" just as I have it. It seems very simple, but for me it was something absolutely new and remarkable, unusually important. If only I would always remember. If I remembered, it would be the end of all judgment, of all evil deed.

"

It is important, especially because, although you are not aware of this fact, you vividly imagine another "I" as your own, and then you feel that any other "I", the most radical "I", is not only a just like yours, but it's the same.

"

To have the consciousness that a foreign "I" is yours is for the good of man, because, recognizing that the foreign "I" is the same as your own, you can do good not only to your "I" but also to everyone else.

"

Love is something other than recognizing other "selves" as your own.

"

The teaching in which I live is not anarchism, but the fulfillment of the eternal law that refuses violence and participation in violence. Will the next be his anarchism, on the contrary, slavery under the Japanese or German yoke? I don't know and I don't want to know.

"

Comet * will engulf the earth and destroy the world, destroy all my material traces and traces of any other activity. So be it. This only shows that any material activity with hypothetical material consequences is absurd. Spiritual activity is the only intelligent activity oriented towards the fulfillment of the desire placed in us, towards the fulfillment of the law. What will be the consequences of this activity I do not know, nor can I assume, because all consequences are temporal, and spiritual activity is timeless, but I know that it is the only intelligent activity.

"

Apart from the Our Father, the prayers for each day of the week and the Reading Circle * I need one more prayer that corresponds to my spiritual need. My last four prayers were, in order: 1) You who are in me, help me. 2) Help me to be with You. 3) Help me to be aware that I am only Your worker. 4) Every time I talk to a man, help me to see myself in him.

"

Man is given only one mission: to increase in spirit. Thinking about the consequences is harmful to the fulfillment of the calling and the unknown thing we are doing, even the consequences we can see. "No one who puts his hand to the plow and looks back is fit for the kingdom of God" *. Our condition may be compared to that of his horse, generally to that of any harnessed animal. It is natural for the animal to move, to advance. Likewise for man, in his spiritual perfection. The animal is harnessed and wants it, doesn't want it, if it moves, then what is connected with it moves, although it doesn't know what and how. In the same way, man, through his spiritual growth, draws something else after him. (He sees something. Sometimes he sees how his evolution contributes to the evolution of others.) That is why the comet is not to be feared. Everything done in the spiritual world remains indestructible when material objects are destroyed.

"

There is no object more disagreeable to contemplation and observation than our corporeal personality. Yes, I don't exist, only my obligations exist.

"

The foundation of physics (as of other natural sciences) is one, the study of the laws of knowledge through the senses. The basic sense is tactile, sight, hearing, smell, taste are subordinate to it.

"

Do not judge by word or thought, and even more do not concern yourself with what people think. Because most often he who lives only with the care of people's opinion judges almost everyone he knows.

"

It's amazing how blind materialists are. I have five senses: sight, hearing, smell, taste, touch. Good. The world is conditioned by this fundamental sense of touch, common to all men and all beings. Good. I, as a human, test the sense of sight, hearing..., but that's not all, can I ask myself what I feel now by sight, touch, smell or taste? In addition, they can test the sense itself in the consciousness of that sense, that is, they can transfer consciousness to one sense or another. Moreover, I think, may I ask myself, what am I thinking? Who is it that has the conscience and asks? It is not a sense and it is not an idea, it is the consciousness of life. But may I ask what is consciousness? And to have the conscience of conscience? Not. Therefore this is the basis of what we call life. And what is life? What we call life, although related to what presents itself to us as the body, cannot in any way be explained in bodily terms.

"

Nothing in this world can be said to exist. Everything that is material happens and passes. If there is anything, it is only what is immaterial.

"

I understood very clearly the overwhelming influence of "science," that is, the memorization of other people's ideas. Nothing atrophies, kills the ability to have your ideas and know how to direct them more than this accumulation of foreign ideas.

"

What a great help my new prayer brings me! Help me, Lord, to be with You. It helps me in general, but I rarely remember it when I'm talking to people. I never thought it could be so hard to remember while talking to people.

"

The essential thing I must do now is to die well. This is the essential thing for everyone, because to die well you have to live well. But at 25 you don't remember and understand it the same way you do at 81.

"

Vanity, the care for worldly glory, with which I have struggled and continue to struggle, is as strong as sexual desire in young beings.

"

Strange thing, I understood that both feelings are equally indispensable for the life of the human collective. Sexual desire is necessary for the perpetuation of the human race, the need for glory, for the continuation of the evolution of human thought. The pursuit of the first is the perpetuation of life, the pursuit of the second is the evolution, the perfection of life.

"

There is no God who can meet our demands, there is only one whose demands we must meet.

"

The secret is that there is something unchanging, related to space and time. This something is consciousness. (Compare with man in Buddhist belief). Consciousness is something still, united with what is in motion. Consciousness of consciousness is love.

"

Consciousness began with birth, so it seems to me. But it is not right: the union of immobile consciousness with a known object in motion, separated in space, began, but consciousness was outside time and therefore could not begin, just as evil does not begin when a mill is built, but the mill starts. And that is why the purpose of human life is to penetrate into consciousness, to reach as much depth as possible, to the extent that it is accessible to every human being.

"

The most refined spiritual delight for the soul, like culinary delicacies for the stomach, is the loving, kind, gentle, unadulterated attitude towards the one who offended you. It's even more refined if you manage to do him a favor without his knowledge.

"

Today I feel very close to God and I pray so well, honestly, with a short prayer: Help me to be with You even when I talk to people, and when I read letters, and when I remember people.

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Forgiveness has no meaning for the Christian. The idea of ​​forgiveness comes from the unchristian feeling and the idea of ​​punishment, of revenge.

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... Consciousness is the simultaneous feeling of the whole and of your being separate from the whole. The manifestation of this feeling is love towards everything and towards oneself. Love is the desire of good for the object of love and therefore love towards everything is the desire of good towards everything and brings understanding, peace, union. But self-love is the desire for good for oneself and it brings enmity, strife, division. Furthermore, love of all includes love of self, love of self excludes love of all. And that is why the love of everything defeats the love of self, and this victory is the life of each individual and the life of the whole world.

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I received an electric pencil as a gift, which when you turn it lights up the place where you write and only what you write. This pencil is an amazing symbol of our life. Turn, free yourself from what hides the light in your soul, and you will live in the light that shows you what you need to see and know to act, only what you need to know to act.

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When it happens to me now, in my old age, to remember the sexual act, I do not feel the revulsion I felt in my youth, but simply amazement, bewilderment that rational human beings could commit such acts.

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God does not impart to man the knowledge of himself through human language, through the word, but through his divine language, which the pure heart of man fully understands without words.

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God is love, that's right. We know them only because we love. But what is God in itself depends on an often superfluous, even harmful reasoning. If I am asked: but does God himself exist?, I must say and I will say: yes, according to all probabilities, only I do not understand anything about him, about this God himself. But God-love is something else. I certainly understand Him. He is everything to me, the explanation and purpose of my life.

"

Good thing that the full meaning of human activity is not accessible during life. If the man whose work will be of great importance in the distant future...had her lifetime consciousness, she would be dizzy. If Christ had known the importance of his works, he too would have believed that he was God.

"

One thing is more and more clear, you don't have to reason about the soul, God and the relationships between one and the other, but you can and must be aware of this relationship and fulfill what is asked of you. [...] It is important to live only through this relationship, keeping only Him in mind and ignoring, despising all other considerations. Keep this relationship in mind, and thus despise the rest of it, despise all that is worldly, and remember only one thing. I console myself with the thought that I am beginning not only to understand, but to feel it.

"

You say that the best life is the one lived for God and that we should live such a life, but you don't live like that... therefore what you say is false.

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Ah, if I could get used to living before the judgment of God, to feel Him always judging me, just as we live before the judgment of men, concerned with it. Oh, that I could live every hour, every moment before Him! What happiness that would be.

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People make the mistake of thinking they can force someone to love them. They can and must only refrain from the things that hinder love: conquer sin, understand temptations, clear up prejudices, and then they will have love, love for all, not only the consciousness of their life, but of the whole life.

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To be an artist of the word, your soul must rise very high and fall very low. Then all the intermediate steps are known to you and you can live in your imagination, you can live the life of people on different steps.

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I do not like, indeed I consider in bad taste, the poetic, artistic and dramatic treatment of religious, philosophical and religious problems, as in Goethe's Faust and others. About these matters we must either not speak at all, or speak with the greatest care and caution, without rhetoric, big words and, God forbid, rhyme.

"

I and we are all workers, some mine iron ore, others transport it, some make nails and screws in a great factory whose organization and especially whose purpose cannot be understood by the workers. The workers do not know and have no way of knowing what is being produced in the factory. And therefore it is clear that the work that the workers perform (fulfilling the requirements of law and conscience) actually has a hypothetical purpose, and the hypothesis is incorrect (for the true purpose escapes our understanding). Work done in this way can only stand in the way of good plant production.

"

I had a very clear idea about the meaning of dreams. The most important and best thing is that I felt with unprecedented clarity that I am aware that I am outside of space, time, spirit and above all stillness, I felt with all my soul how deceptive and illusory everything is it was considered to be true, real life.

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What is happening to you and what you seem to have done in this life was like a dream. Therefore, just as time does not exist for man when he dreams, whether he sleeps for an hour or sleeps for a hundred it is the same for the sleeper, so also for the man who lives in this world time does not exist. Man is always in the present.

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Birth is awakening from sleep. The dreams of that sleep are almost all forgotten, and that life remains unitary and has a real character in this life, just as on waking from a dream all that was shown to us in a dream settles into a coherent form. It is supposed to be the same when we die, all the impressions of life make up a string with which you will step into that life. Our daily falling asleep and waking up are examples of the transition from one life to another.

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There is a total awakening, death, and there are incomplete awakenings in life itself. This is what I'm going through right now. Awakening takes us out of ourselves, and in taking us out of ourselves brings us into the life of the whole, and the life of the whole can be known through love.

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Love is not the principle of life, but only the recognition of the principle of life, God.

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No matter how well you express your awareness of the importance and meaning of your life, the expression itself diminishes the importance of what is expressed.

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Man complains that he is deprived of the good that he ardently wants and seeks it everywhere, only where it is not. In fact, he doesn't even need to look for it, he doesn't need to do anything and he will get this good. There is a parable about this. I forgot her.

"

I am thinking of a letter to the Tsar on the subject of land, a letter of the greatest importance, and at the same time I am thinking of how to tell Sofya Andreevna that Ilia Vasilievich * wants to receive a higher salary. One is the good of the Russian people, about which I speak with the Tsar, and another is an increase of the lackey's levy. But the second is more important than the first, because it requires my participation and determination, while the first I only initiate.

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In a society of men living a spiritual life, a man of superior moral qualities will naturally come to influence and rule them. In the society of people who live only the corporeal, lay life, inevitably the man with the weakest moral qualities will always reach their head and exercise his power.

"

The man was born in his father's house, received an education, and could continue to live by working for his father, but this life also seemed to him hard and meaningless. Then he left the house and went in search of another life, another job. He walked from place to place, sometimes he didn't like something, sometimes he wasn't accepted and he was chased away, and then, reaching the end of his patience, he remembered home. And only then did he find the good, when he returned to the one he had run away from, his father. The same happens with the life of people who leave behind the natural life lived according to the will of the Divine Father and in His service. In the same way, they suffer by going out of His will, and in the same way they find peace and joy by returning home, to Him, to the fulfillment of His will.

"

... Our senses receive by feeling, and for feeling we need matter. But at the same time through matter we are separated from Everything. Matter is necessary for our separation. But why not imagine other beings who can receive impressions and who are not separated by matter but by something else. Just as we, living the illusion of matter, do not know, we have no way of knowing these immaterial beings, because we do not know what separates them from Everything, just as they cannot know us and what separates us, the matter that for them does not exist. All these are trifles, but they captivated me because they showed me, as if more meaningfully, that our world is only one of the infinite number of worlds.

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... The human race or human society will never be divided into two camps: one of wild animals and the other of saints. In reality, the human race is always found in different degrees of spiritual perfection, and between the savage and the saint there are many intermediate steps leading to the perfection of love.

"

I forgot everything. I remember only one thing: what should I answer to him who condemns me because I am not poor like John the Baptist. The answer is that John is a saint, and I am a reserve officer, I did not lead a good life and only in my old age did I start thinking about God and getting closer to how I can serve Him.

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Any prayer that asks is a sign of distrust in God. God is the ultimate reason, the ultimate love. Everything is for our good. What I don't like is only a sign of my inevitable lack of understanding. (That's how it felt last night when I wrote this, and how trite it sounds now.)

"

The work of art is authentic only when the person who receives it cannot imagine anything other than what he sees, hears or understands. When the one who receives it goes through a state similar to remembering, as if it had existed once before, and not once, I knew this long ago, only I did not know how to express myself, and here my self was shown to me. Especially when he feels that what he hears, sees, understands cannot be otherwise, but must be exactly as it is received. But if the receiver feels that what the artist shows him can be different, he sees the artist, he sees his pleasure, then it is not art.

"

There are double arts: music, theater, partly painting, in which the idea, the problem of art and the execution are separated. In music there is composition and performance, so in the theater, the composition of the play and its performance, in part also in painting, generally in the fine arts, conception and execution, and the illustration of books to the greatest extent. In these double arts false art is most often encountered: the idea is vain, while the performance of musicians, actors, or painters is wonderful. But most often it happens in theater and music.

"

There are two consciousnesses. One is that of the body and its various parts, which I can move or that hurt or eat me, and the other is the consciousness of the soul, of its various properties that I can direct on one thing or another or that suffers.

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Prayer: I am glad that I know that You are and that I am, and especially that I know that You and I are one.

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In old age, life passes more and more from the past and future to the present. And the more you transfer the life force, Wille zum Leben *, from past and future to the present, the freer and happier life is.

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My prayer now is: Remember that you have nothing to do with people, that you are before God.

"

Yes, all or almost all of people's unhappiness comes from being preoccupied with others, not self. If people were concerned only with themselves, with their true good, everyone would be (or should be) satisfied with their lives, they would not make others suffer, nor would they suffer because of them.

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I, my "I" do not exist, there is only my duty to Him.

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I as a separate being am an illusion. I am one of the infinitely small organs of the infinitely great Whole, inaccessible to me. My role is to serve this whole, as each cell, each particle serves the body. It is the height of madness to imagine that I am a separate, independent being. I am only an organ. There is no "I". There is only the obligation and the opportunity to serve the Whole, having the consciousness of the joy of this service. Service is possible only if the organ is united with the Whole. Union with the whole is accomplished through love. So love is not the goal of the Whole (God is not love), but only the condition in which the organ, what is presented to me as "me", merges with the Whole. But the purpose of the Whole is not accessible to me, although I know that I serve it.

"

One of the main causes of the limitation of our intellectuals is the rush for modernity, the insistence to find out or at least have an idea about what has been written lately. "If I don't miss something." And in every field mountains of books are written. And all of them, judging by the ease with which they are mentioned in conversation, are accessible. Whatever you were talking about: "But have you read Celpanov, Kuhn, Breding *?" If you haven't read them, don't talk." And you must hurry to read them. But there are whole mountains. This haste and head-butting with trivial, tangled modernity excludes any possibility of serious, true, necessary knowledge. The error is so clear! We already have the result of the thinking of the greatest thinkers who have distinguished themselves in the course of thousands of years among billions and billions of people, and the result of their thinking has been sifted through the sieve of time. Everything that is mediocre has been thrown away, only what is original, deep, necessary has remained. The Vedas, Zoroaster, Buddha, Lao Zi, Confucius, Mencius, Christ, Mohammed, Socrates, Marcus Aurelius, Epictetus remained, and among the new ones: Rousseau, Pascal, Kant, Schopenhauer and many others. People who run after modernity know nothing about all this, they fill their heads with chaff, garbage that will be sifted and nothing will remain.

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There are decent people who lack the spiritual life and, therefore, the understanding of the spiritual life of others, people who would be in despair if they knew that they were causing physical suffering to others, especially those close to them, but without any rebuke of conscience they cause the worst suffering to the spiritual life of fellow men: they make them fight, they offend what is most sacred and precious to them.

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There is physical renunciation and spiritual renunciation. The first is to give food to others when you are hungry too, to give them your money, your work... The second is to yield the glory of a good deed to another, to pass as a fool, a bad man to fulfill the demands of conscience, the law of the God of love .

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The secret of our life, its essence, lies in the transference of self-consciousness as a separate being to self-consciousness as the Whole, indivisible, unique, free, almighty being, God. Life seems to us a gradual release of the divine consciousness within us. Life is this, only this. Those who still believe in the old concept of God can say that God gave people the good of knowing Him within themselves. But that's an arbitrary assumption. There is and it is only right that man's life is liberation in itself (of the immaterial, immovable, nonspatial and timeless principle) from the state of limitation and its ineluctable conditions. The boundary conditions are matter in space and motion in time.

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I am everything and nothing. I am everything when I have the consciousness that I am a spiritual being, inseparable from the whole being, And I manifest this consciousness through love towards the whole of which I have consciousness, that is, towards everything that I accept to be alive. I am nothing when I have the consciousness of being corporeal, separate from the whole being, and I manifest my consciousness of love only towards my corporeal "I", separate from everything.

"

Once upon a time there was a grain of wheat that had lain thousands of years in Egyptian tombs And knew nothing of itself. For himself, for the grain of wheat, it was as if he did not exist. The scholars dug up the graves and, finding the grains of wheat in them, made the experience of taking some, covered them with earth and watered them periodically. and here is how the grain of wheat, which existed but knew nothing about itself, suddenly found out about itself that it exists and that it is at the same time a grain and a sprout of wheat.

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Whatever you imagine in space and time is a / ∞, meaning nothing. Therefore there is, there really is only that which is outside of space and time, my spiritual consciousness, one with the consciousness of all men, one and indivisible, which can be known by me in the present moment outside of space and time.

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Life is the transfer of consciousness from spatial and temporal to nonspatial and timeless. I wrote it like this, but it's incorrect: the transfer is already something temporal. Better said: ... is liberation from temporal and spatial.

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How harmful it is to make plans. As an obstacle arises in the way of their fulfillment, so does irritation.

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Although it seems immodest, I cannot help but write that I very much beg my friends, who collect my notes, my letters, write down my sayings, not to attribute any importance to things that I have not specifically given for publication. I read Confucius, Lao Zi, Buddha (the same can be said of the Gospel) and see beside deep ideas, condensed into a doctrine, strange statements, which are either random or altered. And precisely these strange, sometimes contradictory ideas and maxims are needed by those who accuse the doctrine. I cannot stress this fact enough. Every man has moments of weakness and says foolish things, and they are noted down, and then the world takes note of them as if they had the highest authority.

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I am something that possesses the consciousness of separation from the Whole. The whole and myself together with the whole I cannot understand otherwise than as matter in motion. And meanwhile, if I were only matter in motion, and the whole world were also only matter in motion, then I, being matter in motion along with the other matter in motion of the whole world, would not have the consciousness of my separation. And therefore, having the consciousness of my separation, I must be something immaterial and immovable. If it happens that he, this "I", together with the Whole, seems to me matter in motion, it is only because everything apart from him, this "I", is matter in motion. What we call life is the liberation of the immaterial, immobile "I" from this wandering.

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What for Lao Zi is the way, for John is love. Lao Zi confuses the path with the beginning of everything, with the Tao. John does the same thing, calling love God.

"

I thought of how I used to shoot birds, wild animals, and end their lives by stabbing birds in the head with a knife and rabbits with a knife in the heart, without a trace of mercy. I did things that I can only think about now with horror. Doesn't the same happen with the people who now judge, imprison, give sentences, execute? It is not good to believe that these people know what they are doing is wrong, and yet they persevere. One way or another, they stopped seeing that what they were doing was wrong. That's what happened to me with rabbits.

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I feel that most people do not see me as a human being, but as a celebrity, as the representative of a party or a current: either it's total devotion and trust, or, on the contrary, denial, hatred.

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We humans, I judge for myself, are the tool of supreme power. What this Supreme Power does with our lives we do not know and have no way of knowing, just as the cell in my body does not know what I do and why. Therefore, any goal that I propose, if it does not coincide with the goal of the Supreme Power, which remains inaccessible to me, disrupts the fulfillment of this goal. To such an extent that the goal can no longer be achieved. This goal will always be reached, in one way or another, but without me reaching the good that gives the feeling, the consciousness of the unity of my life with the Supreme Power. So the goal towards which it is proper for man to strive cannot be a goal accessible to man's understanding, but only merging with God's will. This fusion is achieved through love.

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People's false opinion of me forces me to remain in this state. As hard as it is, sometimes I begin to understand how good it is for the soul.

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I pray simply: Father, God, help me, help me. And He helps me. He can't help me. He, the one I pray for, is in me, so prayer only means that I want to live through Him.

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The work of art is truly the work of art only when, receiving it, man seems, not only seems, but even rejoices, that he, the man, has produced such a wonderful thing. This is especially important in music. Nowhere is the major importance of art, the significance of union, better seen. The "I" of the artist unites with the "I" of all those who receive it, merging into one.

"

Any worship of God, whatever it may be, exalts man. He exalts himself because he expresses the consciousness of his dependence and relationship (even if the understanding of this relationship is false) with the Supreme Being, who is not dependent on anything, with God.

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The surest way to falsehood is care for worldly glory. And that is why freedom from this worry is so important. Liberation is produced only by concentrating all forces on the fulfillment of what God wants from me, what the Whole wants from his infinitely small organ. And freedom from falsehood, living in truth, is freedom and goodness. Help me, Lord.

"

I pray: Help me, Lord, God who is in me, help me to do only what pleases You, and not to think about what people will think and say about me. Help me not to judge people with words or thoughts. Of course, but it usually happens that you live with the care of people's opinion, the same people you condemn.

"

About love we must always remember que c'est a prendre ou a laisser (That we must choose if we accept it or not (fr.). (N. t.)). If we accept goodness, the necessity of love, we must accept love in its entirety, without removing from it (from Christian love) its essential sign: love towards those who offend you, facing enemies, non-resistance. For we speak of goodness, the beauties of self-affirming love, of tender love, but we do not respect the first and most important condition of love, the non-perfection of those opposed to love.

"

There are four categories of God's workers, that is, four ways of doing the deeds of life, like categories of workers who work for the master. The first category are workers who invent ways to please their master outside of working hours and therefore allow themselves not to do their assigned work. They represent the various religious doctrines with dogmas of faith and atonement, mysteries, prayers, etc. The second category are workers who, instead of working, waste all their strength sharpening, cleaning, protecting the tools of work, and work less and less because they are busy taking care of the tools and because they are afraid of damaging them. These are the people who, instead of consuming their bodily forces for God's work, take care of their bodies to preserve them as long as they can. The third category are the workers who do not know the master and do not want to know either him or the thing entrusted to them, but do a job that they have invented and that they consider the most important for them. These are the people who do not recognize that there is an obligatory moral principle, they do not recognize God, and therefore they invent all kinds of concerns alien to God, political, scientific or so-called cultural concerns. The fourth category are those who devote all the powers of soul and body to the fulfillment of God's work: the increase in oneself, and through this also in others, of God's consciousness, of love expressed through deeds, words, thoughts.

"

I felt acutely that I was God's servant. And I felt such joy, safety, peace, even pride. And I also acutely felt this self-delusion of people who get involved, I once got involved too, they think they are servants of the worldly rulers, and the more they climb the steps of this service, the more they descend into God's service.

"

Anger comes from helplessness, said Rousseau. How true it is! He gets angry who wants to do something beyond his powers, encounters obstacles and then gets angry. And nothing that is material is in the power of man. The only activity in which man does not encounter obstacles is the spiritual one. What I want, I do. If I don't succeed, I get angry with myself (I have more understanding with myself than with others), and the anger is less painful and especially not useless. There is only one way out, one activity that does not encounter obstacles - spiritual activity, love. Man is like an animal that struggles in a room where there is a door, and hits the door without seeing it, because the door opens inward.

"

It is not difficult to arouse in yourself pity for the lost, but the difficulty lies in the fact that the lost are self-confident and self-satisfied. This self-satisfaction causes revulsion, and we must get used to bearing it, so that it does not stifle pity, that is, love. But how? Where is a will is a way *. We must use the same good, single and most powerful method, love.

"

I thought that at the root of the fact that life is illusory is what we call movement. Fundamental to illusion is movement. Movement presupposes the illusion of time and space. Time, as I said, is the ability to imagine two objects in one and the same place. Space is the ability to imagine two objects at the same time. Movement is the ability to imagine objects moving from one place to another. The number of objects, however, both for the infinitely small and for the infinitely large, cannot be imagined other than infinity. And therefore the number of passages of objects from some places to others cannot be imagined other than infinity.

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... Motion, the thing without which we cannot think, understand, acquires the consciousness of life, is but illusion, just as when, standing still, while everything around you is running uniformly, it seems to you that everything stands still you run on the spot. So it is with the essence of the human "I". The "I", the true "I" of man is outside of movement, space and time, but he cannot understand life otherwise than in movement, and it seems to him that the world is standing still (although movement takes place in the world) and he is moving, evolving, aging, approaching death and dying. He seems to come and go, and the world remains. All these are obviously illusions.

"

The life, both of each separate being and of the whole world, is this liberation, this good which increases and increases liberation. Why? Why does this happen? Why is this process of liberation, that is, life, needed? Man is not given to know. The only thing he can know is that therein lies the good, the great good of life. And obedience to this law increases good.

"

When I have no self-consciousness I live an animal life; when I have self-awareness and do what I decide with my soul, I live a human life; but when I am aware of the life of other creatures, loving them, I live a divine life.

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Yes, here is a good definition of love: Être un homme n'est rien ; être homme est quelque chose; être l'homme voila ce que m'attire * - Amiel.

"

In addition to other positive consequences, the most beneficial result of people's judgment, gossip, insults is that any judgments, insults and especially gossip take you away from the care of human judgment and, without your permission, bring you closer to the care of the judgment of your conscience, the care God's judgments.

"

No kind of riots, revolts, unions bring even a thousandth of what abstinence from two things, drinking vodka and enlisting in the army can bring.

"

You talk to a man about simple, clear things, it would even seem necessary and indispensable for everyone, and he just waits for you to finish. And when you're done, respond with cunning, very clever reasoning related to the issue at hand. You wonder, what will this be? He is a man interested in all knowledge and capable of understanding, knows mathematics, solves chess problems wonderfully, and suddenly shows such a lack of understanding. Why? Because he feels that your idea destroys his position, and he values ​​his position more than the truth of the idea. That's why he doesn't understand, he doesn't want to understand what you say. Here is the explanation of all the absurd reasonings, recognized by the sciences that reign today. All this because people fall into two categories: for some the idea leads life, for others the opposite. Herein lies the key to explaining the madness of the world.

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All evil comes from the fact that, by perverting the idea, people force it to serve their advantage.

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Strange as it may seem, the firmest, most inflexible beliefs are the shallowest. Deep convictions are always mobile.

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People do not understand the truth and invent strange sophistry to refute it or to defend their position, or not to accept that all their work has been a vain and harmful waste of time.

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Although I clearly understand God, not the known God, but whose consciousness I can have, I often wish I had a personal God to whom I could pray. It's a weakness, a habit and at the same time a natural desire to communicate with God as I communicate with people, although that's not what it's about. It's a possible, natural desire. To fulfill it we must believe that He is exactly as I would like Him to be, that is, a personal being, to whom I could address not necessarily internally, as actually happens, but through external communication, as a separate being.

"

As long as you live without asking who it is that lives in you, you live like an animal. But as soon as you ask yourself and you have found in yourself the one through whom you live, you have known the one who lives in Everything, you have also known love, you have also known God.

"

It is good and necessary to remember the nothingness of our "I", nothingness in the true sense, i.e. the fact that the bodily "I" is absolutely nothing, a / ∞, i.e. zero. Only the spiritual "I" is something, the organ of something. Today, walking in the morning, I understood with all clarity this nothingness, nothingness in space too...infinitely small hum in the middle of an infinitely large world, and in time - the whole life of eighty years is a moment that means something only when you live in the present moment.

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It is said: think not of death, and death will not exist. In fact it is just the opposite, remember death incessantly and you will have the life for which there is no death.

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I don't like talking to people who, by listening to you, imply that they know what you're going to say and agree in advance. Please, we understand each other and that's it. My peasants almost always listen and that's what I say.

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Our life is like a night's dream in which we forget everything that was before the dream.

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Very important and ancient thing since the world, but it's the first time I understand it: for life to be lived in joy (and it should be), it is needed (truly, not with words, but with deeds) as the goal that you are looking for it not to be your person, Lev, but the deeds of love, and all the deeds of love are always outside of me, in others. For the first time I understood that it is possible. I will learn.

"

Our whole life, all the points of interest of our life are in objects that are found at a certain time in certain states. The objects themselves are different by the places they occupy in space, and space is infinite and therefore objects are equal, that is, they represent nothing in relation to the infinity of space, a / ∞. Likewise with the temporal states of objects: they are nothing compared to the infinity of time. Therefore, what we mean by infinity and what we call infinity is only an indication that everything material and personal in our life is illusory, unreal.

"

People's selfishness irritates you, upsets you. But think only, and you will see that they are to be pitied. They are deprived of the greatest good, which is incomparable to nothing, the good of the self-consciousness of that which is always free, always joyful, always outside time and the constraints of matter.

"

And now the most important thing (so it seems to me). I have the consciousness that I am the All and at the same time I am separate from the All. And my life (and that of all beings) is the destruction of the barriers that separate us. The mystery of my life, of every man, indeed of every being, is the recognition of our separation from what is actually the All.

"

In order for man (and any being) to be aware of his separation from All, he must be aware of himself in moving matter. Matter without motion is nothing, and so is motion without matter. Matter can be conceived only in infinite space, and motion only in infinite time. The infinity of one and the other shows that they are illusory, imagined. Separation of beings is one of the manifestations. Of what? Why? We are not given to know. Man knows only that he is All And at the same time a separate being. He knows that that love, which he feels for himself, and then for the All, is the only basis of the life separated from the All.

"

Inaction (according to Lao Zi) is more important than action, because action is most of the time beyond our power, but inaction is always within our reach. All clear commandments, don't kill, don't steal, don't lie, don't commit adultery, are always negative. The positive commandments can only refer to spiritual activity, which is always free: love, wish for another what you wish for yourself... Lao Zi's inaction stems from his belief (from the metaphysical basis, to use a nasty word) , from the belief that Tao is both in heaven and in man, or that God is independent and in man. Lao Zi's teaching is not to act, that is, not to do what man wants of you, but to let the Tao-God who lives in you do through you what He wants.

"

And in moments of weakness and moments of strength I like to say: Help me, God... And I think no one hears me, but I say it anyway. And it occurred to me: if the attitude of the beginning of all towards me is like my attitude towards the parts of my body, so that I can by the power of will be conscious of one part or another of my body, why not I imagine that just as I can, if I want, insert myself, my consciousness, into my hand, my foot, my finger, so also the One from whom I ask for help can, if he wants, insert Himself, His consciousness , in His particle, in me, in my soul imprisoned in the body? (All this is a fantasy, but a pleasant one.) If so, just as the suffering of one part of my body awakens the consciousness of that part, so my suffering, of my whole being, awakens in God the consciousness of my "I." How can you not wish for suffering?

"

I feel a joy And I feel like crying. I feel like throwing up In the arms of eternity. I feel a joyful tenderness. At night I dreamed... and debauchery, and a talk with Lao Zi, and the man's attitude towards inaction, rather towards the One who does not act, was so clear. Man only acts out of weakness. Only by not acting does one merge with the Tao, the non-doing beginning. Do not perform, but live with the Tao. At night everything was absolutely clear and full of joy.

"

I thought about worldly glory. In this need for people to have a good opinion of you, to love you, there is something irresistible and legitimate. And it occurred to me: the more false, the more guilty is the desire for praise and love of people during life, the better, more legitimate is the desire to continue your life in the souls of other people after death. In this desire there was no indulgence for the cult of personality, nothing out of the ordinary. It is only the desire to participate in the general, universal, spiritual life, in the work of God, disinterested, impersonal. It seems right.

"

Only what is spiritual in our life really exists. Thus, the new consciousness of the spiritual truth is an accomplished fact, even if this consciousness has not acquired or will never acquire (because of death, for example) the translation into fact. The spirit is outside of space and time, therefore consciousness, if it is really spiritual, sincere, then it has already been accomplished at least in intention.

"

Yes, I read Engels's Marx yesterday... I woke up today with a clear, simple, easy-to-understand denial of materialism. In the waking state it was no longer as clear as in the dream, but something still remained. Namely, that materialists must accept that the Creator made an error in explaining why matter arranged itself in such a way as to form separate beings, of which I am the first, and with such attributes as the senses and the mind. For the non-materialist it is clear that everything I call the material world is the product of my "I". For him the main secret is the separation of me and beings.

"

Strange as it may seem, materialists must accept the Creator in order to answer the question of why matter exists, whence arose the material world with its transformations. Without the recognition of the basis of all that is, of consciousness and matter in space and time as the only possibility to understand the world around us, there is no other explanation for the existence of matter than God the Creator. Materialists pride themselves on their atheism, but all their teaching implies *, includes the concept of God the Creator. Les extremes se touchent **. Only the recognition of the ground of all that is, of consciousness, does not need the concept of God the Creator.

"

Two smart and good people when they are messed up become stupid and bad when they meet. What can come out good when 20, 100, 1000 come together, when they all come together?

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How important it is to know and remember this when we are in public and be forewarned. That is why religious teaching is so important. It frees us from submission to the mob. Only her.

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God is that whole from which I am conscious of being separate. He who has the consciousness of separation from the material Whole will have a God in turn, but the trouble is that the material Whole is absurd, because it is infinite, just like time and space.

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The worst deeds are done for the sake of worldly glory. Bad deeds are also committed out of carnal lust, only that lust decreases with age, instead the temptation of worldly glory increases and increases with age.

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Apparently, what could be more innocent than a funny and harmless joke? But in fact the joke is one of the most common, powerful and insidious methods of masking the seriousness of life and sins for those who do not want to see them.

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Old people forget a lot, almost everything. Dying, forget the last things. If we imagine the birth in the future life, when he comes into the world, the one born does not remember anything, that is, he finds himself in the same state as every newborn child in our world (so the Buddhists believe). The only thing wrong is that rebirth requires time, and forgetting is only an exit from temporal conditions. Death always remains a return to the state from which you came out, not a transition to another life. The worker has completed his mission and returns to the master to receive new orders.

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A bad mood is not only not harmful, but it is useful for working on yourself.

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Instead of thinking that the mind does not work well due to insufficient irrigation of the brain with blood or our soul is clouded because we have problems with the liver, could we not say that the brain is insufficiently irrigated and we have problems with the liver because the mind works poorly and the soul is it cloudy The two are inseparable. The cause is at the same time the effect. Usually, however, we consider matter as the cause of the soul because our attention is directed to the material transformations, and not to the soul ones.

"

There is only one true knowledge: knowing how to live. People know a lot, but they don't know that, and I really think they don't need to and don't need to know how to live. Unnecessary knowledge occupies their minds and prevents them from knowing what they need to know.

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Miracles are needed by those who lack a rational basis for faith.

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When you believe in love you have nothing to ask for. You just have to do.

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The hardest age, the critical age, is the one when a person stops growing, gaining strength... I think around 35. The development, the growth of the body ceases and the development, the spiritual growth must begin. Most do not understand this and continue to be preoccupied with body growth, and the consequence of this misdirection is damaging.

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I can't help but wonder why God chose a wretch like me to speak to people through him.

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Buddhists say that just as old people forget all the past, newly born souls do not remember their previous lives. We might add that as we approach death (old age), we not only forget the past, but we lose all interest in the future, that is, we get out of the ephemeral life and approach the timeless beginning of life, God.

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All that is material is not even insignificant, it is nothing, because everything is always a / ∞ = 0. Only "I", my consciousness, really exists. Then they will say that there is nothing, there is neither life nor its meaning. Not true. Life is about clearing, and clearing takes place only in the temporal and spatial world, which in itself is unimportant, but necessary for the clearing of consciousness. It seems that Muhammad said: God wanted not to be the only one who receives good and made men.

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Just as we get used to making the cross, saying the words of prayer, so we can and must get used to loving and respecting people. Thank God, I started not long ago, but I got used to it: I often do it unconsciously. Help me, God! So good.

"

About the One Commandment. To believe that an unseen witch gave birth to me, not the mother I see, is to deprive myself of the joy of motherly love. And people do this, imagining a non-existent God, a Creator God of the whole world and of many miracles, and therefore they do not know their true God who manifests himself through love.

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In the beginning you have to clearly separate yourself from people's opinion, so that the false, humiliating opinion of others about you does not touch you. You will be scared and lonely, but if you manage to get over it, to put everything before the God in you, before your conscience, how strong, firm and free you will be. Foolishness in Christ is a great thing.

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We know God in three ways: a) in himself, b) in ourselves, and c) in our neighbor. To know him in himself is to know his will in order to accomplish it. To know him in ourselves is to know this will in love. To know him in our neighbor is to love our neighbor as ourselves.

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I invented a prayer for the meeting with each person: Help me, Lord, to deal with this manifestation of Yours with respect and love, to think only of Your judgment, and not that of people. And that helped me a lot.

"

As usual, I walked through the woods and prayed. Today for the first time I included at the end of the prayer about temptations the most necessary thing: the consciousness of sin and the weakening of the worry about the judgment of people. Help me, Lord, when I talk to people to think only of what I have to do before You. It's hard, but what freedom, and not only that, what power you get when you succeed.

"

It seems to us that we have a lot, a lot of work to do. But it's not true. There is only one, the work on yourself, the purification, the release in you of the divine "I". This work is joyful, unhurried, always within your reach, and as you toil it is always done and never finished. You always have before you the prospect of the same work, but increasingly charged with joy.

"

Not only has "No man ever seen God," but it is not in the power of man to comprehend Him with the mind. As one said: I know the law and the source, the cause of the law, not only the cause of the law, but also the cause of my life. But how is this not only I cannot understand, but I know I cannot even try to understand. Praise, prayer, repentance are impossible in relation to God. Not that He does not hear them, but it is a meaningless relation in relation to Him. It would be like saying that a bug subject to the law of gravity asks, praises, repents in relation to the movement of the heavenly bodies. But all this is not well said. I understood for the first time that I am one of the manifestations of the infinite trifles of life in relation to the infinitely great life, therefore the relation I am in is this: I am almost nothing, but I am in relation to the All. No, I cannot or do not know how to express not only the concept of God, but also my relation with him.

"

Just as my little finger can only have self-consciousness if I want it to have self-consciousness, so I can have self-consciousness when God has self-consciousness in me. But just as my little finger cannot grasp the whole body, so I cannot grasp God who has self-consciousness within me.

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Prayer is as good as it can be and necessary, but true prayer, because it raises man to that higher spiritual level to which he is able to rise, gives him the strength to fight with the flesh.

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I wrote like this: to consider that your individual life is the only true life is madness, dementia. Fake. That is not possible. I would rather say: the more universal life you accept in your individual life, the less individual life, and vice versa. But that can't be done either. It cannot be because what we call our individual life is the divine principle, the same that lives in everything. What we call mercy, participation, love is only the manifestation in us of this principle.

"

We are talking about the boundlessness of time and space (therefore also about the size of objects). In essence, however, this inevitable acceptance of the infinity of time, space (size) is only the acceptance of the fact that everything that is temporal, spatial (big, small) is illusory, that is, in fact there is no size of time and space, because any size , a year, millions of years, a verse *, a billion kilometers is nothing, a / ∞. Time and space only give the form of the spiritual principle, and in this consists what we call life.

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I have lived long enough to understand that I am not the one who lives, but God lives through me. It seems crazy arrogance, but I feel it so sincerely that it is true humility. All my villainy is not my life, it is not me, for me my life is only what is good in it. As little as it is, it exists. And this bit does not belong to me, it belongs to God. All the efforts I can make, all my efforts are only to open my soul for God to come in, to leave room for his work, stifling my impulses.

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To love God is to love His manifestation. The consciousness of His manifestation is clearest (above all) in me. But I can't help but see His manifestation everywhere: in the sky, on the earth, in the stone, in the sand, in the stars. The difference between these manifestations is only that some are closer to me (not in place, but in the nature of the manifestation), and others are more distant. The closer they are to me, the more I can and must love them. The most distant from me are the earth, the stone, the sand, the sky, the planets. It's natural to love them too, but the tree, the plant are closer to me, And I love them more, I love animals even more, and most of all the one closest to me, man. But even more, more than anything in the world, I cannot but love myself, my self, but not the corporeal, miserable self, which must be as far from me as any animal, even as stone or sand , but the spiritual self, which if I love I reach love itself, love towards everything. Bodily selfishness is repulsive, but there is nothing higher than spiritual selfishness, the transference of your consciousness into the spiritual, eternal, universal self. This transfer is done through love and brings with it a good that makes you want nothing else. How can we not thank the One who gave us this good?!

"

Why do I not at all accept the presence of life in rock, sand, but do not reject the possibility of life in the stars? Probably because I know the stone through all my senses, and I do not find life in it, but I know the stars only through the sense of sight, and therefore I accept the possibility of life. But this does not prove that there is no life in the stone, and there may be in the stars, but only that my five external senses are insufficient to penetrate the life of the stone.

"

One of the main mistakes that prevents the fulfillment of the law of love is the idea that in order to live in accordance with the teaching of Love, it is necessary for each person in his life to fully fulfill the law of love. Fulfillment is not necessary, full fulfillment is impossible, if it were fulfilled there would be no more life, only the approach to fulfillment is necessary. This closeness represents life and its good.

"

Usually, for people the teaching is the full fulfillment of the law of love, and seeing the impossibility of this fulfillment for each individual and for all humanity at the moment, solve the problem by accepting that the teaching is wonderful and, at the same time, unrealizable. Some this leads to the denial of any religion, others to a perversion of Christianity in which the impossibility of fully fulfilling the teaching is corrected by grace, faith in salvation and mysteries. This mistake leads people away from the clear understanding of life that comes from the teaching of love, according to which the goal of life is this approach to perfection. The approach must necessarily be gradual, it starts with reaching the first steps of perfection, then the next ones, etc.

"

As the Chinese sage says, to climb the mountain you have to start at its foot. This gradation is the main difficulty in putting into practice the teaching of love. You cannot strive to be charitable if you are agonizing and keeping possessions useless to life. You cannot be humble if you consider yourself a boss, an aristocrat, an important worldly person or a high church figure. You can't be a lover of people if you're in the military, if you're a soldier.

"

True, I now have the painful consciousness of pride because the other temptations have weakened, but bracketing my old age, pride remains one of the most damaging temptations. It is harmful especially because it replaces religious feeling or conscience. And that is why it is perhaps the worst, the most harmful of temptations. For others, it is dangerous, repulsive for the lecherous, the miser, the angry, the liar, but for me the worst is the proud man, the one who does everything for the sake of people's opinion. For the other temptations there is a limit, for the latter there was none. Only faith frees man from slavery to the opinions of men.

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In education, the most important thing is to teach children (and even adults) to act independently of people's opinions.

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Celebration is a bad sign for me. The celebration of Mecinikov * gave me something to think about. We're both obviously stupid people if we've been such a crowd pleaser. I am only consoled by the fact that it is not the envious people who criticize me, but the revolutionaries, and the church leaders, the clergy.

"

There are two gross and harmful prejudices: first, that God who made the world and man gave him a concrete law, expressed in words; second, that the world known through our senses is in reality as it is presented to us, and our life, i.e. the law of our life, is defined by our relations with this world. The first prejudice is widespread among the masses, but gross as it may be, it is less gross and less harmful than the prejudice of the educated minority regarding the organization of life, a prejudice which arises from the attitude towards the world known by the senses of those who do not recognize that their own view of to the world it is a belief, when in fact it is only a belief, even a ridiculous one.

"

"What is the meaning of life? What is good and what is bad? What is God? What is spirit, what is matter?" etc. The student, the young man asks all these questions imagining that only he is so clever that he can ask them and stand out... But he, poor him, is so ignorant and incurably stupid, confident, that he does not know, nor does it occur to him, that these questions have been put to him by the most enlightened minds in the world, and have received answers of which he has no idea. This ignorance is very widespread and it's the sign of stupidity.

"

Time is only that form in which I have the consciousness of my life, in which I have the joy of making it. My whole life already exists for the source of life, for God. Through me and an infinity of other beings God lives and gives us the joy and good of life to me and to all these beings. What we call freedom of the will, and what freedom really is, is the acceptance or non-acceptance of God in me, so that He can make life through me and live. Not accepting Him in me deprives me of the good of life, but it cannot prevent Him from living, for He lives in an infinity of beings, in a way incomprehensible to me. Furthermore, he also lives in beings who do not consciously accept him within themselves. And, living in them, he achieves his goals. The important thing is that man, each of us, possessing the unconscious good of life, can have part of the greatest conscious good, can be God's tool, uniting directly with Him and making His life and at the same time our life. The rain waters the plains, the forests, the steppes and the grains that already grow there, the trees, the grass receive through the moisture the joy of growth, flowering, fruiting, but the moisture, the rain also acts on the desert land, softening it, preparing it to receive the seeds and their sprouting . The same with people, those who consciously participate in the divine life and those who do not have the consciousness of God, but participate, without knowing it, in His life.

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When we talk to people we should not think about our desires, but about their desires. But not to their judgment about us, but to the way our relationship with them will be judged.

"

I had to make an effort to remember how I behaved with an olog. And that's because I behaved properly, that is, well. Good deeds cannot and must not make us happy. The joy, the good is not in the deeds, but in the peace, in the freedom they bring us.

"

Cruelty is not peculiar to man and is explained only by the narrowness of the goal, the concentration of life's efforts on the goal. The narrower the goal, the more likely the occurrence of cruelty. Love aims at the good of others and is therefore incompatible with cruelty.

"

Morning prayer. I believe that God lives in me and in every person, and therefore I want to love and glorify him in myself and in others, and for this to do nothing against Him. Not to upset, not to insult, not to judge anyone, to be lenient with everyone, to do to others only what I want to be done to me, to love everyone. Evening prayer. I believe that God is in me and in all people, and therefore I do not want to do anything against Him, but here I have done both. To think about why I did what I did, so as not to do it again.

"

The knowledge of God can be threefold: a) through faith, b) through reason and c) through love. I can believe that God is what I have been told about Him. I can arrive by reasoning at the recognition of the beginning of all that is, at the existence of something indestructible outside of time and space, at the necessity of accepting either boundedness or unboundedness, and here lies the mark of unreality. I don't express myself well, I want to say that everything that is corporeal, occupies a limited space in infinite space and is produced in infinite time in both directions, all this does not exist in reality. There is that which is outside of time and space. And the essence is only what we call God. We can come to accept the existence of God by having the consciousness of something outside of space and time, that is knowing Him through union with Him expressed in love.

"

About the rotten apple and generally about any seed. I don't know if I will be able to express myself. get the idea: My body is destroying itself. This is how the body of a rotten apple is destroyed. The apple, the seed coat, rots, the seed remains which produces other apples and other apples. Even clearer is the case of seeds that do not have a body shell, such as cereals. Is it possible that the only purpose of the apple is to reproduce its kind? Is it possible for man to have the same purpose? But there is already something else in the apple besides the reproductive seed, the covering that has its purpose. Obviously, man must also have another purpose besides reproduction. Moreover, that other purpose is the true, the main purpose. Reproduction is the most insignificant and it is not even a purpose, because repeating the same thing does not make sense. What is the purpose of this?

"

I remembered about my villains clear and pregnant... And I dare to judge people. It felt so good to realize my villainy.

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I know God because I know my love for people and for all living things. I know that I live only because I love myself and I love everything that lives.

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I do not love people and I do not love my soul because I know God and know His will, but I know God and I know His will because I love people and I love my soul.

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I know God because I know my soul. And I know my soul because I love my soul, and not only my soul, but also the souls of other people, the soul of the whole world.

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Cruelty and injustice provoke rebellion only in the beginning. Then you get rid of it. And when you are born and live in them, like now, when they have invaded the earth, you can't even see them anymore.

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Man knows he will die, and he does die every day. It would seem that you come to know this in order to understand (what no one understands) that the meaning of life cannot but be independent of the ephemerality of existence. The meaning of life is the fulfillment in this world of the will of the one who sent you or of what gives meaning to every moment of life, and the meaning is given by only one thing: fulfillment, striving towards the fulfillment of the only desire in which you can be free, moral perfection .

"

Short prayer. I know that if I am in love I am with You. And if I am with You, all is well. So I will always love everyone with deed, word and thought. (I learned it by heart.)

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(Very important) Through reason we know God, we know love. Until we know love, reason seems to be everything, God (God is the word).

"

Last night I had a shameful, crazy thought, that it is amazing that I, my poor, pitiful, scoundrel self, was chosen by God to be His manifestation, an infinitesimal particle , lowly, and yet His.

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The man looted the whole village, put all the loot in a pile and is guarding it. A naked man comes and steals a shirt. The thief catches him and punishes him according to the law that he also established. Isn't that what all the rich, and especially the landowners, do to the poor? Loot endlessly millions from thousands of people. They took the fodder of the cows and horses from them, and the one judged and condemned is not the robber, but the man who took the necessary things from the land that belongs to him with proper documents. Before laws are made forbidding the stealing of yokes, timber, hay, laws must be made forbidding the plundering of the most lawful property of the people, the land.

"

None of the sins: theft, fornication, murder, and others do 1/100,000th of the harm that the justification of the smallest weakness does. All the atrocities committed by governments and the lies spread by the church are based on such religious, patriotic, socialist justifications.

"

Elevating marriage to the rank of a mystery, on the one hand, and on the other hand to the rank of the form of the supreme good of life is an ordinary mistake. It's as if eating has been elevated to the rank of mystery or supreme good.

"

First of all we must understand that there is and cannot be any feat, no kind of heroism, nothing "great". There is only fulfillment and non-fulfilment of duty. It's as if the stableman, cleaning the stables, the plowman or the reaper would talk about what a great feat, what a heroic, great deed they performed yesterday cleaning the stables or finishing plowing the field or mowing the hay.

"

I read in Kant: Religion is only within the limits of reason. We have the same opinion. Today I read the same thing. I'm so happy we agree. How happy, how grateful. Now, before going to bed I felt almost painfully the desire to pray to God, to ask for his help, to be aware of him, of his help, and it hurts and I am glad to tears. I prayed and asked Him to help me and be with me. And He was and is. And now when I write I am happy to the point of tears. Who is he? He is the one I know through love, and communication with Him exists, and I cannot but express this in the form of a request, a prayer. I cannot but express this communication.

"

Living in time means living in the past and the future. To build the hypothetical future from the known past. And what happiness you feel when the past is almost gone, like me now, and the future is also gone, but to a lesser extent. And the interest in the past (I really forgot everything) and the future disappeared as the interest in the present, that is, in real life, increased.

"

The older you are, the shorter the past and the present, the more focused you are on the present. Dying, the full concentration is in (contradictio in adjecto) the timeless moment.

"

Until now I did not understand the importance of working on my thoughts. This work takes place almost exclusively in the present: today I thought badly, I straightened up, and nothing upsets me anymore. And how important it is! I think about L., about G., about myself, what I will do, and I correct myself immediately. I see that I advance more in this work than in any other.

"

Having my journal read and copied from it disturbs my writing. I would like to say better, clearer, but there is no need. And I won't do it. I will write as before, without thinking of others, as it happens.

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Yes, God breathes through our lives (of all separate creatures). What is He doing through us? We don't know and we can't know. We only know that this is what our life consists of, and if we know it, it is good for us and it is easy for us, the string and our work and His work goes on.

"

People in our times have no choice: either they perish with certainty by continuing the same way of life, or they fundamentally change their lives *.

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Yes, man must obey and place above all only one law, that which is proper to all and whose application brings good to all.

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Consciousness of the divinity of your soul is the rational metaphysical basis of life. Love is the manifestation in life of this consciousness of your divinity (the religious basis of life). Restraining the passions, sins, temptations that stand in the way of the manifestation of love is the well-companioned life (the moral foundation).

"

Yes, there were three categories of people: thieves, beggars and workers. I belong to the first. We thieves are insufferable, but the beggars are worse: one asks for money, another for advice, for a place, for another rescue. Yes, vivre et laisser vivre *. Selfishness is the worst and the best feeling, if you are selfish you don't need anyone but yourself (and God) and you don't need to ask anyone for anything.

"

To the commandments not to kill, not to steal, not to fornicate, we must add: do not ask.

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All that is alive, true, grows unnoticed, and so does true faith in the soul of a man and of all men.

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I dreamed that someone gave me a letter or a prayer of the abbot of Optina (I forgot his name), the teaching abbot, and I read and am delighted with this writing. It contains so many wonderful things, quiet, full of old, loving wisdom, but I forgot all but one thing that moved me powerfully: that he can teach no one, nor advise him what to do. He cannot teach him, firstly because he does not consider himself higher and wiser than that, whoever he may be, secondly, because all a man needs to know is told in revelation (so says the old man) and in everyone's heart. And he cannot advise what to do because no one knows and cannot know which circumstance or deed will bring an apparent, corporal, greater good.

"

For our (true) good and to be in the service of people (fulfilling your purpose in the world) two qualities are needed: 1) to be satisfied with the external conditions in which you live and 2) to always be dissatisfied with your state of mind. Do nothing to change your external state and direct all your forces, concentrate them to perfect your soul. Most people, however, do the opposite: they are permanently satisfied with their soul and themselves, and always dissatisfied with their condition, they strive to improve it and thus harm the soul even more. It is a very important thing especially because [...] for my own good, and this is the essential thing, if I am satisfied with the outside and dissatisfied with the inside, the goal to which I direct my forces lies in my power; in the opposite situation the object to which I direct my forces was not in my power.

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Concern for the opinion of men and worldly glory hides, not hides, but diminishes, diminishes the joy of doing good only to meet the needs of your spiritual "I" (God's will).

"

How strange that I don't feel like looking at the signs of withering of the body: hair loss, a lump on the ear, wrinkles, moles... Why do we rejoice when the body grows, gains strength? Why does the mother rejoice when she is weakened by pregnancy, the one to be born screams with pain and joy, and I, the old man, do not rejoice at the signs of the approach of new life? Out of a bad habit. I was long overdue to let go of him and enjoy the nearness of...I wouldn't want to say death, the new life? (I have no right to say), of approaching a state which is so natural and must be as good as puberty.

"

We cannot conceive of our life here except in terms of space and time. But we can only have the consciousness of our true life outside of space and time, always in the present moment. And that is why, speaking about life outside the conditions of this life, about life "before" birth and "after" death, we cannot, we must not attribute to it the conditions of space and time, to say where life will be. We only know that the life before birth was and the one after death will be different from the one now, that is, it was not and will not be spatial and temporal. how will it be We don't know, we have no way of knowing.

"

The best and worst thing is self-love, selfishness. The only question is who is it that I love more than anything? If it is the carnal self, it is bad, if it is the spiritual self, it is the best thing that can be. And this spiritual selfishness of the "I" I felt today for the first time in my life and I felt its benefit. It started with an unpleasant feeling caused by the poor souls. "Isn't that your task, your material, to love the unloving, the repulsive?" And immediately all trouble and heaviness disappeared. And thanks to this solution I have used it a few times today in communicating with people and every time with success. And very, very good. If only I could keep it that way.

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We, I, are just talking about how in us and in every man lives, God manifests. But these are not words, it is the undeniable truth. So we must live according to him. But what does it mean to live according to him, the truth according to which God is in every man? It means that when we meet, when we talk with a man, we must remember that we are dealing with the manifestation of God, that is, at every meeting with him, we must be in a pious, prayerful mood. Prayer is the awakening in you of the supreme spiritual state, the remembrance of your religiosity. Communication with man is the secret of communication with God, communion. Oh, that I would always remember this! It's possible. And I will try.

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I vividly imagined a short story or a drama where there were no bad, stupid people, all are good and all are innocent. How good it would be and how meaningful the wickedness and guilt of the organization of life would appear against the background of this goodness.

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Humanity and every individual passes from one season (saison) to the next, from winter to spring; first I cut the brooks, the willow, the grass, the birch, and the oak, then the flowers, and here are the fruits. It's as if I feel in myself and in humanity the bearing of the fruits.

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Self-forgetfulness?! Can you forget yourself when the "I" is only the corporeal "I"? Self-forgetfulness is the giving up of what I wrongly consider to be my own. Self-forgetfulness is the recognition of your divinity, your eternity.

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The problem is what man wants to achieve, what is his ideal. If he wants wealth, honors, glory, pleasures, he will have a certain life. If he wants love from all people, he will have a completely different life. It's all about the ideal. If he wants riches, honors, glory, pleasures, man will think how to take more from others to have for himself, how to spend and give less to others. If he wants honors, he will be approving, flattering, submissive to those in power, he will be haughty, he will limit himself to people, he will despise those he does not need to be successful. If he wants glory, he will sacrifice everything, including the lives of others and his own, for the sake of success. If he wants pleasure, he will invent means of increasing pleasures, transforming them and bringing forth even more powerful ones. But if man wants love towards all people, he will remember when he is alone with himself how in his past life, yesterday, today, he did not respect the love of people, how he did, said, thought something bad, unloving, he will think what prevented him from doing it, what faults, temptations, habits, and he will think how to get rid of them.

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If he wants love, man will naturally restrain himself in deeds, words, thoughts from those things which for the one who does not live according to the law of love are the main goal in life. He will refrain from agonizing and keeping wealth, from obtaining honors and glory, he will refrain from all pleasures which are not accessible to all and are always acquired by some at the expense of others. People say it's hard. But I say this only because, not feeling the joy of love, I do not know it and do not believe in it.

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The great thinkers, Christ, Lao Tzu will reveal the truth, the people below them in spirit, the disciples (Paul), will bring it down, adapt it to the majority. Most will lower it further, invent legends. The wider the circle, the smaller the truth. And then people who are strangers to the faith will appear who will strengthen everything.

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Never have I felt such a strong desire to die, a quiet, firm, joyful desire. It seems that I have nothing to do here. Of course, it only seems that way. If I am kept here, I have a job to do and I will do my best to do it. Ohne Hast, ohne Rast * Thank God, thanks to this wish to die my heart is at peace again.

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May what happens to me be not according to my will, but according to Your will. I wish for the future neither success, nor worldly glory, nor bodily powers, nor prolongation of life. I want only one thing: to be in You and to have Your consciousness in me, I want to love everyone in thought, word and deed.

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I am still not satisfied with the form of the prayer. It's the evening of the 9th. I want to express myself differently: I don't want anything for the future, knowing that everything will be good, I don't want people's praise either, knowing that my purpose is not in people's love for me, but in my love for them, love with deed, with word, with thought.

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... It is not true that the temptation of worldly glory leaves a man at the moment of death, often it is the other way around, in these moments it intensifies, as in all vain heroic deeds. Vanity is the driving force in almost everything. Yes, vanity, the thought of worldly glory is one of the main obstacles to devoting your life to the service of the spiritual foundation outside of you and within you: from outside you understanding more and more clearly His requirements, and from you subordinating your life more and more to these requirements.