Skip to content
quotesby

About this quote

What does it mean?
Loving life includes accepting suffering, especially undeserved pain, as part of a divine connection.
In plain terms
To love life is to love God, even when you suffer without deserving it.
What can you take from it?
Accept suffering as part of loving life and God.

Where it applies

  • during pain
  • spiritual practice
  • finding meaning

Putting it to work

  • embrace suffering
  • seek spiritual meaning

Questions to consider

  • How do you find meaning in pain?
  • Is suffering part of faith?

Another view

It may discourage seeking to alleviate real injustice or pain.

More from Leo Tolstoy

  1. While imprisoned in the shed Pierre had learned not with his intellect but with his whole being, by life itself, that man is created for happiness, that happin…

    Permalink to quote #29
  2. For us, with the rule of right and wrong given us by Christ, there is nothing for which we have no standard. And there is no greatness where there is not simpl…

    Permalink to quote #31
  3. Love hinders death. Love is life. All, everything that I understand, I understand only because I love. Everything is, everything exists, only because I love. E…

    Permalink to quote #28

Related quotes

  1. Pain is not the only essence of our God, nor is hope in a future life or a life on this earth, neither joy nor victory. Every religion that holds up to worship…

    Nikos KazantzakisNikos Kazantzakis quote #58
  2. That God of the clergymen, He is for me as dead as a doornail. But am I an atheist for all that? The clergymen consider me as such - be it so; but I love, and …

    Vincent Willem Van GoghVincent Willem Van Gogh quote #1
  3. I cannot think we are useless or Usen would not have created us. He created all tribes of men and certainly had a righteous purpose in creating each.

    GeronimoGeronimo quote #2