Sense of pleasure we may well
Spare out of life perhaps, and not repine,
But live content, which is the calmest life;
But pain is perfect misery, the worst
Of evils, and excessive, overturns
All patience.
Leo Tolstoy's life has been devoted to replacing the method of violence for removing tyranny or securing reform by the method of nonresistance to evil. He would meet hatred expressed in violence by love expressed in selfsuffering.
There is something so ludicrous in promises of good or threats of evil a great way off as to render the whole subject with which they are connected easily turned into ridicule.
But at sixteen the conscience rarely gnaws So much, as when we call our old debts in At sixty years, and draw the accounts of evil, And find a deuced balance with the devil.
"I have no more than twenty acres of ground," he replied, "the whole of which I cultivate myself with the help of my children; and our labor keeps off from us the three great evils - boredom, vice, and want."
There is nothing besides a spiritual world; what we call the world of the senses is the Evil in the spiritual world, and what we call Evil is only the necessity of a moment in our eternal evolution.
All acts of living become bad by ten things, and by avoiding the ten things they become good. There are three evils of the body, four evils of the tongue, and three evils of the mind.
Evil always wins through the strength of its splendid dupes; and there has in all ages been a disastrous alliance between abnormal innocence and abnormal sin.