Leo Tolstoy
Translated by
Dmitry Fadeyev
True faith attracts people not so much by promising the good to the believer, but by presenting the sole refuge of salvation, not just from all the ills of this life, but also from the fear of death.
If you are conscious of having no faith, then know that you are in the most perilous position in which a human being can find himself in this world.
It is bad if a human being does not have something he is ready to die for.
The followers of utility have no morality other than the morality of profit, and no religion other than the religion of material welfare. They have found the body of the human being disfigured and exhausted by poverty, and in their thoughtless fervor said to themselves: “Let’s heal this body; when it becomes strong, fat and well fed, then the soul will return to it.” But I say that it is only possible to heal this body by healing the soul. The root of the disease is in the soul, and corporeal ailments are only external manifestations of this disease. Modern humankind is dying from an absence of a common faith that would connect the earth to heaven, the universe to God. It is the absence of this religion of the soul, of which only empty words and lifeless forms remain, it is the complete absence of the consciousness of duty, the ability to sacrifice oneself, that has caused the human being to fall, like a savage, prostrate into dust, and to erect on the empty altar the idol of “profit.” The despots and princes of this world have become its high priests. And they are the source of the repulsive teaching of profit, which says: “Each only for his own, each only for himself.”
— Giuseppe Mazzini
If we examine the causes of the calamities that plague humankind, going from the immediate down to the more fundamental, we will always arrive at the principal cause of all of humankind’s calamities: the absence or weakness of faith, i.e. the ambiguity or falseness of the human being’s established relationship to the world and its Source.
A person who professes an external law is like someone standing in the light of a lantern attached to a post. He stands in the light of this lantern, it is bright enough for him, and there is nowhere else for him to go.
A religious person is carrying a lantern in front of himself on a pole of some length; the light is always ahead of him and always induces him to move after it, revealing to him a new illuminated space that keeps drawing him towards it.
Salvation does not consist in rituals or mysteries, nor in the profession of this or that faith, but in a clear understanding of the meaning of your life.