Art begins when a man, with a purpose of communicating to other people a feeling he once experienced, calls it up again within himself and expresses it by certain external signs.
Leo TolstoyRead
A man can live and be healthy without killing animals for food; therefore, if he eats meat, he participates in taking animal life merely for the sake of his appetite.
Interpretation
The quote suggests that it's possible to live healthily without consuming meat, implying that eating meat is a choice driven by appetite rather than necessity.
Leo Tolstoy's quote reflects an ethical stance on food consumption, emphasizing that humans have the capability to sustain themselves without harming animals. It challenges the justification for meat-eating by asserting that such actions are primarily motivated by personal desire rather than survival needs, thus questioning the morality of taking life for mere culinary pleasure.
In practice
This quote could be shared during a discussion on healthy eating habits.
Art begins when a man, with a purpose of communicating to other people a feeling he once experienced, calls it up again within himself and expresses it by certain external signs.
Pierre looked into the sky, into the depths of the retreating, twinkling stars. "And all this is mine, and all this is in me, and all this is me!" thought Pierre. "And all this they've caught and put in a shed and boarded it up!
People try to do all sorts of clever and difficult things to improve life instead of doing the simplest, easiest thing-refusing to participate in activities that make life bad.
It's too easy to criticize a man when he's out of favour, and to make him shoulder the blame for everybody else's mistakes.
Music is the shorthand of emotion. Emotions, which let themselves be described in words with such difficulty, are directly conveyed to man in music, and in that is its power and significance.
A quiet secluded life in the country, with the possibility of being useful to people to whom it is easy to do good, and who are not accustomed to have it done to them; then work which one hopes may be of some use; then rest, nature, books, music, love for one's neighbor β such is my idea of happiness.
A man who moralizes is a hypocrite, and a woman who does so is invariably plain.
Where there is no imagination there is no horror.
Indeed, when religious people quarrel about religion, or hungry people quarrel about victuals, it looks as if they had not much of either among them.
Thoughts can create such a barrier that even if you are standing before a beautiful flower, you will not be able to see it. Your eyes are covered with layers of thought. To experience the beauty of the flower you have to be in a state of meditation, not in a state of mentation. You have to be silent, utterly silent, not even a flicker of thought - and the beauty explodes, reaches to you from all directions. You are drowned in the beauty of a sunrise, of a starry night, of beautiful trees.
We're such a funky species. We're so violent, so greedy - this is how we roll. But what are we going to do about it? How do we move forward given who we are? Because situations don't come out of nothing. They come out of certain conditions.
The only true and effective "operator's manual for spaceship earth" is not a book that any human will ever write; it is hundreds of thousands of local cultures.
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