A Calendar Of Wisdom
People can reach heavenly joy: those pure ones who are filled with the desire for a good life receive pleasure in their body, in their material life. When your mind and your heart are pure, then the divine will be opened for you. Brahmin Indian wisdom
A Calendar of Wisdom
Tolstoy spent the next seventeen years collecting those pieces of wisdom. In 1902, in his late seventies, seriously ill and confronting mortality, he finally sat down to write the book under the working title A Wise Thought for Every Day. Once he sent the manuscript to his publisher, he returned to the diary and exhaled:
What a great treasure can be hidden in a small, selected library! A company of the wisest and the most deserving people from all the civilized countries of the world, for thousands of years, can make the results of their studies and their wisdom available to us. The thought which they might not even reveal to their best friends is written here in clear words for us, people from another century. Yes, we should be grateful for the best books, for the best spiritual achievements in our lives.
January 24 Nobody knows where the human race is going. The highest wisdom, then, is to know where you should go: toward perfection. A wise man seeks wisdom; a madman thinks that he has found it. PERSTAN PROVERB It is not the place we occupy which is important, but the direction in which we move. OLIVER WENDELL HOLMES Your actions should be determined not by the desire of the people around you, but by the needs of all mankind. April 23 Real goodness is always simple. Simplicity is so attractive and so profitable that it is strange that so few people lead truly simple lives. Do not seek happiness elsewhere. Give thanks to God, who made necessary things simple, and complicated things unnecessary. GREGORY SKOVORODA Most of our spending is done to forward our efforts to look like others. RALPH WALDO EMERSON Every great thing is done in a quiet, humble, simple way; to plow the land, to build houses, to breed cattle, even to think you cannot do such things when there are thunder and lightning around you. Great and true things are always simple and humble. No one looks less simple than those people who artificially strive to seem so. Artificial simplicity is the most unpleasant of all artificial things. July 9th People mistakenly think that virtue lies in the knowledge of many things. What is important is not the quantity but the quality of knowledge. Socrates thought that stupidity was incompatible with wisdom, but he never said that ignorance was stupidity. We live in the age of philosophy, science, and intellect. Huge libraries are open for everyone. Everywhere we have schools, colleges, and universities which give us the wisdom of the people from many previous millennia. And what then? Have we become wiser for all this? Do we better understand our life, or the meaning of our existence? Do we know what is good for our life? JEAN JACQUES ROUSSEAU Reading too much is harmful to your independence of thought. The greatest thinkers I've met among scholars are people who do not read too much. GEORGE LICHTENBERG Do not fear the lack of knowledge, fear false knowledge. All evil in this world comes from false knowledge. Knowledge born in argument and discussion is to be doubted. October 16 God is in all of us, and it is possible for all of us to find and understand him there. To know yourself is to discover the good that lies within. God is close to us, he is with us: the divine spirit is inside of us. If he were not, the power to be good would be beyond our reach. A person cannot be good without God. LUCIUS ANNAEUS SENECA If you are going through a hard time, work harder to understand God; as soon as you understand Him, all difficult things will become easy, and you will feel love and joy. If a person does not feel a divine force within himself, this does not mean that a divine force does not exist in him, but that he has not yet learned how to recognize it.Translation copyright 1997 by Peter Sekirin
Tolstoy spent over fifteen years collecting "the wisdom of the centuries in one book" (6). He began compiling this wisdom in written form, as quotes from the world's sacred texts and from famous (as well as obscure) artists, in 1902-1903. The first version of the resulting book was published in 1904. It was reprinted three times during his lifetime, variously titled Thoughts of Wise Men, A Circle of Reading, or The Way of Life. It is the early version of the book that made it into the 1957 Soviet edition of Tolstoy's collected works as Krug chteniia: izbrannye, sobrannye i raspolozhennye na kazhdyi den' L'vom Tolstym mysli mnogikh pisatelei ob istine, zhizni, i povedenii. However, between 1904 and 1907 Tolstoy worked on a substantially enlarged, revised version, which differed significantly from the first. Now the thoughts were grouped by topic - God, Intellect, Law, Love, Diving Natures of Mankind, Faith, Temptations, Word, Self-Sacrifice, etc. - and ordered as themes for each day, week, and month. In addition, he included a short story for the end of each week, and called these The Sunday Reading Stories. It is this second, complete version, entitled A Calendar of Wisdom, which Peter Sekirin has translated into English for the first times. Only The Sunday Reading Stories (52 vignettes in all) are not included in this translation.
The concerns of Lao Tzu were also the concerns of Tolstoy. The pressing questions of the 19th century are also our own. So, A Calendar of Wisdom is not just any book of quotes but wisdom for posterity. Have all these thoughts stood the test of time? Many of them, yes. But, some of these thoughts have not aged well. And some of them will not be agreeable at all. These imperfections show no one can be right about everything every time, not even the wisest among us.
Thank you, Eswar, it was a really good read. As a child, I used to listen to Indru oru Thagaval by Tenkachi ko Swaminathan on the Radio every morning before going to school. As a teenager and young adult, I had a calendar of Vivekananda quotes.
That might not sound like a biggie. But calendar conflicts are frustrating and stressful. They can also cause you to fall behind in your work. And, they could also fracture relationships if this becomes a recurring issue.
Dual Enrollment students plan ahead. In college, you are responsible to make sure that you set goals and meet all deadlines, so it can be helpful to develop a system for keeping track of assignments and due dates. Canvas includes helpful features including a calendar and To Do list, and some students like to use a planner or phone app. Online students need to allow time for technology glitches and keep in mind that all assignments are due in Eastern Standard Time. 041b061a72