Stop And Think!, Two Wars, Nikolai Palkin (Best Illustrated Books Book 31)

“STOP AND THINK!” by Leo Tolstoy. Here are some passages from this book:“In my opinion, not only is work not a virtue, but in our defectively organized society it is more often a means of moral anaesthesia, just as are tobacco, wine, and other means of drowning thought and hiding from ourselves the disorder and emptiness of our lives...”“The meaning of your life cannot consist in the pursuit of your personal well-being, or in that of your family or your nation, because that well-being can be attained only by detriment of that of your neighbor.”“Every one knows also that the preparations for war made by the different nations lead on to terrible massacres, to the ruin and degeneration of all the peoples who participate in this circle of armaments. No one doubts but that if the present order of things be prolonged for some dozens of years, the result will be ruin, imminent and general.”“Evidently some secret but overwhelming reason prevents them from doing what is to their advantage - what would save them from the dangers that menace them, and what the law of their God and their conscience alike dictate to them. Are we to conclude that love applied to life is a chimera? If so, how is it that for so many centuries men have allowed themselves to be deluded by this unrealizable dream? It must be high time to recognize its futility. But mankind can neither resolve to follow the law of love in their lives nor to give up the idea.Why is this? What is the reason of this contradiction, enduring so many centuries? It is not because men of our day lack either the desire or the possibility to do what is dictated to them, both by their common sense and by the danger of their position, and above all, by the law of that which they speak of as God and their conscience. But it is just because they are doing what M. Zola advises them to do: they are so busy, they are all so engrossed in work commenced long ago, and it is impossible for them to pause to collect their thoughts and consider what they ought to be.”"Nikolai Palkin" by Leo Tolstoy.Here are some passages from this book:“Caesar needs my money - take it; my house, my labors - take them; my wife, my children, my life - take them; all these things are not God's. But when Caesar requires that I apply the rods to my neighbor's back, that is God's affair. My behavior - that is my life for which I must give an account to God; and what God has forbidden me to do that I cannot give to Caesar.”“This horrible disease lies in the deception: in this fact that for a man there can be any sanctity and any law higher than the sanctity and the law of love to one's neighbor; in the deception, which conceals the fact, that, though a man in carrying out the demands of men may do many bad things, only one kind of thing he ought not to do. He ought never at any one's instigation to go against God, to kill and to torture his brethren.”“How was it possible that this old man, if he had understood what ought to have been clear to him, as he stood on the very threshold of eternity, did not realize that between him and his conscience and God, as now on the eve of death, there was and could be no mediator, so there was and could be none even at that moment when they compelled him to torture and beat men? How is it that he did not understand that now there was nothing that could atone for the evil he had done to men when he might have refrained from doing it? that he did not understand that there is an eternal law which he always knew and could not help knowing - a law which demands love and tenderness for man; and what he called law was a wicked and godless deception to which he should not give credence?”