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
What this quote means
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.
Themes
Animal RightsVegetarianismEthical EatingMoralityHealth
In practice
Example use cases
This quote could be shared during a discussion on healthy eating habits.
More from Leo Tolstoy
All quotes βPierre 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!
Leo TolstoyRead
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.
Leo TolstoyRead
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.
Leo TolstoyRead
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.
Leo TolstoyRead
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.
Leo TolstoyRead
Similar quotes
I'm very attracted to exile literature - particularly Nabokov - exactly because the idea of being away from home for any serious length of time is so inconceivable to me.
Zadie SmithRead
The more important the subject and the closer it cuts to the bone of our hopes and needs, the more we are likely to err in establishing a framework for analysis.
Stephen Jay GouldRead
If I could not go to Heaven but with a party, I would not go there at all.
Thomas JeffersonRead
Nothing is forgotten in the processes of idealization. Reveries of idealization develop, not by letting oneself be taken in by memories, but by constantly dreaming the values of a being whom one would love. And that is the way a great dreamer dreams his double. His magnified double sustains him.
Gaston BachelardRead
Do you not see with your own eyes the chrysalis fact assume by degrees the wings of fiction?
Alfred De VignyRead
All the forms of civil polity have been tried by mankind, except one, and that seems to have been reserved in Providence to be realized in America.
Ezra StilesRead