Flesh eating is simply immoral, as it involves the performance of an act which is contrary to moral feeling: By killing, man suppresses in himself, unnecessarily, the highest spiritual capacity, that of sympathy and pity towards living creatures like himself and by violating his own feelings becomes cruel." "As long as there are slaughterhouses, there will be battlefields.
Leo TolstoyAll great literature is one of two stories; a man goes on a journey or a stranger comes to town.
Leo TolstoyThe life of our class, of the wealthy and the learned, was not only repulsive to me but had lost all meaning. The sum of our action and thinking, of our science and art, all of it struck me as the overindulgences of a spoiled child.
Leo TolstoyWar is not courtesy but the most horrible thing in life; and we ought to understand that, and not play at war. We ought to accept this terrible necessity sternly and seriously. It all lies in that: get rid of falsehood and let war be war and not a game.
Leo TolstoyBut the older he grew and the more intimately he came to know his brother, the oftener the thought occurred to him that the power of working for the general welfare โ a power of which he felt himself entirely destitute โ was not a virtue but rather a lack of something: not a lack of kindly honesty and noble desires and tastes, but a lack of the power of living, of what is called heart โ the aspiration which makes a man choose one out of all the innumerable paths of life that present themselves, and desire that alone.
Leo Tolstoy