Leo tolstoy why should i live

My knowledge, confirmed by the wisdom of the sages, has shown me that everything on earth — organic and inorganic — is all most cleverly arranged — only my own position is stupid.

And those fools — the enormous masses of people — know nothing about how everything organic and inorganic in the world is arranged; but they live, and it seems to them that their life is very wisely arranged!

Ignorance behaves just in that way. Ignorance always says just what I am saying. When it does not know something, it says that what it does not know is stupid. Indeed, it appears that there is a whole humanity that lived and lives as if it understood the meaning of its life, for without understanding it could not live; but I say that all this life is senseless and that I cannot live. I long lived in this state of lunacy, which, in fact if not in words, is particularly characteristic of us very liberal and learned people.

But thanks either to the strange physical affection I have for the real laboring people, which compelled me to understand them and to see that they are not so stupid as we suppose, or thanks to the sincerity of my conviction that I could know nothing beyond the fact that the best I could do was to hang myself, at any rate I instinctively felt that if I wished to live and understand the meaning of life, I must seek this meaning not among those who have lost it and wish to kill themselves, but among those milliards of the past and the present who make life and who support the burden of their own lives and of ours also.

And I considered the enormous masses of those simple, unlearned, and poor people who have lived and are living and I saw something quite different. I saw that, with rare exceptions, all those milliards who have lived and are living do not fit into my divisions, and that I could not class them as not understanding the question, for they themselves state it and reply to it with extraordinary clearness.

Nor could I consider them epicureans, for their life consists more of privations and sufferings than of enjoyments. Still less could I consider them as irrationally dragging on a meaningless existence, for every act of their life, as well as death itself, is explained by them.

To kill themselves they consider the greatest evil. It appeared that all mankind had a knowledge, unacknowledged and despised by me, of the meaning of life. It appeared that reasonable knowledge does not give the meaning of life, but excludes life: while the meaning attributed to life by milliards of people, by all humanity, rests on some despised pseudo-knowledge.

He considers the necessary irrationality of faith and contemplates its unfair ask of forsaking reason:. Rational knowledge presented by the learned and wise, denies the meaning of life, but the enormous masses of men, the whole of mankind receive that meaning in irrational knowledge. And that irrational knowledge is faith, that very thing which I could not but reject. It is God, One in Three; the creation in six days; the devils and angels, and all the rest that I cannot accept as long as I retain my reason.

My position was terrible. I knew I could find nothing along the path of reasonable knowledge except a denial of life; and there — in faith — was nothing but a denial of reason, which was yet more impossible for me than a denial of life.

From rational knowledge it appeared that life is an evil, people know this and it is in their power to end life; yet they lived and still live, and I myself live, though I have long known that life is senseless and an evil.

By faith it appears that in order to understand the meaning of life I must renounce my reason, the very thing for which alone a meaning is required….

A contradiction arose from which there were two exits. Either that which I called reason was not so rational as I supposed, or that which seemed to me irrational was not so irrational as I supposed. Verifying the line of argument of rational knowledge I found it quite correct. The conclusion that life is nothing was inevitable; but I noticed a mistake. The mistake lay in this, that my reasoning was not in accord with the question I had put.

The solution of all the possible questions of life could evidently not satisfy me, for my question, simple as it at first appeared, included a demand for an explanation of the finite in terms of the infinite, and vice versa. In my reasonings I constantly compared nor could I do otherwise the finite with the finite, and the infinite with the infinite; but for that reason I reached the inevitable result: force is force, matter is matter, will is will, the infinite is the infinite, nothing is nothing — and that was all that could result.

Philosophic knowledge denies nothing, but only replies that the question cannot be solved by it — that for it the solution remains indefinite. Having understood this, I understood that it was not possible to seek in rational knowledge for a reply to my question, and that the reply given by rational knowledge is a mere indication that a reply can only be obtained by a different statement of the question and only when the relation of the finite to the infinite is included in the question.

And I understood that, however irrational and distorted might be the replies given by faith, they have this advantage, that they introduce into every answer a relation between the finite and the infinite, without which there can be no solution. So that besides rational knowledge, which had seemed to me the only knowledge, I was inevitably brought to acknowledge that all live humanity has another irrational knowledge — faith which makes it possible to live. He is in the condition of a healthy and hungry man, who says to himself, — How sweet this crust is!

Adopted from Wikiquote. Last update June 3, Leo Tolstoy Russian writer - Truth , God , Men , Love. Money , Men , Women , Love. And it was after that that I found out the truth. I learnt the truth last November — on the third of November, to be precise — and I remember every instant since.

To be in love is to be curious. A thing is only beautiful if we do not have surfeit of it, perhaps only what is new is beautiful; in any case we can only love what is new. In order to love people we have got to know too well, we must first of all forget them, not altogether but very nearly. This they learnt during the fortnight. They didn't tell each other that they had learnt it; they were careful, that is, untruthful.

To be able to love someone a long time one must lie, quite often to oneself, but mostly to the person one loves. Thinking , Men. Loneliness , Men. Though I was quite convinced of the impossibility of proving the existence of a Deity Kant had shown, and I quite understood him, that it could not be proved , I yet sought for god, hoped that I should find Him, and from old habit addressed prayers to that which I sought but had not found.

I went over in my mind the arguments of Kant and Schopenhauer showing the impossibility of proving the existence of a God, and I began to verify those arguments and to refute them. Cause, said I to myself, is not a category of thought such as are Time and Space. If I exist, there must be some cause for it, and a cause of causes.

And that first cause of all is what men have called "God". And I paused on that thought, and tried with all my being to recognize the presence of that cause.

And as soon as I acknowledged that there is a force in whose power I am, I at once felt that I could live. But I asked myself: What is that cause, that force? How am I to think of it?

What are my relations to that which I call "God"? And only the familiar replies occurred to me: "He is the Creator and Preserver. I became terrified and began to pray to Him whom I sought, that He should help me.

But the more I prayed the more apparent it became to me that He did not hear me, and that there was no one to whom to address myself. And with despair in my heart that there is no God at all, I said: "Lord, have mercy, save me! Lord, teach me! But again and again, from various sides, I returned to the same conclusion that I could not have come into the world without any cause or reason or meaning; I could not be such a fledgling fallen from its nest as I felt myself to be.

Or, granting that I be such, lying on my back crying in the high grass, even then I cry because I know that a mother has borne me within her, has hatched me, warmed me, fed me, and loved me. Where is she - that mother? If I have been deserted, who has deserted me? I cannot hide from myself that someone bored me, loving me. Who was that someone? Again "God"?

He knows and sees my searching, my despair, and my struggle. And I had only for an instant to admit that, and at once life rose within me, and I felt the possibility and joy of being. And the worst of all was, that I felt I could not do it. Not twice or three times, but tens and hundreds of times, I reached those conditions, first of joy and animation, and then of despair and consciousness of the impossibility of living.

I remember that it was in early spring: I was alone in the wood listening to its sounds. I listened and thought ever of the same thing, as I had constantly done during those last three years. I was again seeking God. He does not exist, and no miracles can prove His existence, because the miracles would be my imagination, besides being irrational. All that was around me came to life and received a meaning.

But my joy did not last long. My mind continued its work. The conception of God is something I can evoke or can refrain from evoking in myself.

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