A Calendar of Wisdom: Daily Thoughts to Nourish the Soul, Written and Selected from the World's Sacred Texts

Inspiring and beautifully written!

Really have enjoyed this calendar so far in 2024. It has a nice mix of authors converging on and discussing a topic daily. Very well done. Recommend!

Leo Tolstoy once called this book his greatest work because there are contained within this book some thoughts from many of the greatest minds that Tolstoy admired. He believed that the only really true enduring religion is one which all people could share, and accordingly he was not one for preaching the dogma of any specific religion, by taking general ideas from the Bible, Koran, Talmud, Greek philosophy, and Buddhist teaching, along with thoughts from great thinkers such as Marcus Aurelius. When one reads this book, they are acutely aware that these deep thinkers and their religions share much more in common than in conflict.Readers beware that Tolstoy is not directly quoting these people,; he is more or less paraphrasing them in his own words and style to make them more readable and pertinent. Each page is a days worth of quotes pertaining to a particular theme with one quote highlighted by Tolstoy. A weakness is that it has omitted his Weekly Messages, each one consisting on 5-10 pages, which make the whole document a more complete package as a whole (perhaps one day these too will be translated into English as a companion book).What I like about this book most of all is using it as a day-by-day guide to illuminate one's own path of a life, which is worth living with a brightness undimmed by time. Another useful feature is that for each day one paragraph is in italics to condense the essence of the author's teachings for that day -- providing the essence of the day's thought.A real treasure and a worthwhile read.

Do you like quotations from important historical and philosophical figures? Then, this is a book for you. It seems that Tolstoy initially put together these for himself. It is a useful book to add to your library but I wished I had known about its content before buying.

How to become a Human, day by day

Some of this world’s must profound writing organized around daily themes and commented upon by Tolstoy himself. To be savored and pondered in a daily moment of solitude with a cup of coffee or a glass of wine

Due to the poor binding quality, I will be lucky to read this book once without it falling to pieces. Before I started reading it, I reinforced the spine with packing tape because it is going to fall apart. I would send it back, but I really want to read this book.

I'm so glad to have found this book, a rare book in America, here for the first time in English (recently), apparently. It was one of Tolstoy's very last works (THE last?), and he stated that it was his favorite of his own books. Which was humble of him to say, because it's probably at least half composed of various quotations and sayings of wisdom from a wide array of philosophers, Christian, non-Christian, and even secular. The other half or so of the book is his own thoughts and messages to us. It's structured as a "daily devotional", and each day's entry has a particular topic or theme--the main points of which are (in this edition, though apparently not in the original work of Tolstoy's) conveniently italicized for us. Tolstoy was imperfect and inconsistent just like every other genius. (What IS "consistency"? Even machines and robots and assembly-lines make mistakes...) But he was much to be admired, I feel, for his often radical stands for conscience and truth in a typically corrupt contemporary society--in his case, Russia's. He made many controversial but impressive decisions (giving away much of his wealth, starting at least one Christian community, and voluntarily becoming a laborer, though he was by birth a privileged Count and aristocrat); he wrote many controversial works (like "The Kreutzer Sonata", a short story which was mostly a diatribe against lust and sexual politics, and which even encouraged celibacy in marriages!), and made many controversial statements (for instance, calling his two earlier, famous, epic novels "Anna Karenina" and "War & Peace", "the works of an idle mind," if memory serves.) He was a genuinely born-again Christian, but he was uncommonly friendly and open-minded toward other faiths and philosophers, as long as he discerned in them a genuine interest in truth and love. This book shows how "ecumenical" (in the best sense of that word) he came to be, in his old age. Yes, he might be divisive, but he was an honest seeker of truth, and I look forward to meeting him in Heaven. This "daily devotional"--a swan song, of sorts--is attractively typeset, formatted, and bound, and (most importantly) will surely give the seeker of truth many wise words & perspectives to meditate upon.

This book si excelente to grab a few words of spiritual and wisdom inspiration

...after all, it's the hugely significant Tolstoy, who chose this collections of bits of wisdom and Biblical quotes and proverbs and so on. But it's a bit like finding out that Dostoevsky would have enjoyed watching some soap opera. It's a sort of Readers Digest version of quotes from various sources with well-meaning bits from the New Testament - and you could just read that instead - which doesn't mean there isn't anything here worth knowing. After all, any ordinary person could spend time and put together say fifteen hundred of their favourite quotes of life advice or something like that, and there would be dozens of them you would love and agree with, whether the collector/editor behind them was some kind of genius or some kind of fool. So if you don't mind being selective, or if you're "ordinary religious", sure, it's fine. But it's not one of the world's ultimate intellectual and philosophical resources. (Of course, neither am I!!)

This is one of the few books a person could read for their entire life.Just turn the page to todays date,read the page repeat for rest of your life and you sure will get wiser.

Filled with gems, wisdom, and questions to make you ponder and show you the way. A bit on the pricey side, even if buying used, but much much better than anything you would ever find on some self help or business book list.

Bon emballage, Livre de bonne qualité