Tolstoy's Words To Live By

Here is Leo Tolstoy’s first book of “Daily Thoughts,” never before translated into English, compiled by Tolstoy in 1906 to share inspiring quotes from more than forty philosophers for each day of the year.

Aphorisms and ideas collected by Tolstoy in his other volumes have affected the lives of millions. Among those who were profoundly influenced by Tolstoy and his radical efforts to encourage higher morals were a young Hindu lawyer named Mahatma Gandhi and a young preacher in the Southern U.S. named Martin Luther King. Gandhi described himself as being “overwhelmed” by Leo Tolstoy’s “independent thinking, profound morality and truthfulness.” Tolstoy was one of the first intellectuals to seek the cross-cultural wisdom of as many great thinkers as he could, from all centuries. When Leo Tolstoy went viral one hundred years before the internet, authorities in Russia sought to limit his influence.

Now, re-discovered and revived by two Canadians, here are the once-suppressed ideas from the likes of Confucius and Aristotle and Lao-Tse to modern thinkers of Tolstoy’s era that he first began collecting in 1903. Tolstoy felt his novels War and Peace and Anna Karenina were far less important than his distillations of wisdom. Tolstoy’s Words To Live By shows why.