Leo Tolstoy
Circle of Reading
Translated by Dmitry Fadeyev

August 27

The most necessary and important subject of study for every human being is his self, his spiritual being.

1

A person who knows all the sciences but does not know himself is a pitiful ignoramus. Conversely, a person who knows nothing but himself, his spiritual self, is wholly enlightened.

2

Most people want to know God but do not want to know themselves. Let them recognize and grow the good within themselves, and then they will know God, for there is no other way to perceive him.

— Lucy Mallory

3

When a human being asks nature about who he is, he receives no answer, for he alone is the answer to this question; he must get to know himself.

— Lucy Mallory

4

When you feel the need for strength: spend time in solitude.

— Thoreau

5

The path to glory goes through palaces, to happiness through bazaars, and to virtue through deserts.

— Chinese saying

6

The inner world of the great majority of people is like an ocean, so vast that they hesitate to explore it; but sooner or later they will have to enter it and look for that heavenly shelter which they sought for in vain in the external world.

— Lucy Mallory

7

A human being always has a place of refuge from every calamity; that place is his soul.


How insignificant a human beings’s sorrows would seem to him if only he understood who he is.