May You Never Grow Up
Tolstoy, after The Talmud
“We often make judgments about other people. We call one person kind, the other stupid, the third evil, the fourth clever. But we should not do so. A man changes constantly; he flows like a river, and every new day he differs from what he was before. He was stupid and became clever; he was evil and became kind at heart; and so on. You cannot judge another person. The moment you blame him, he becomes someone different.” (Tolstoy, after The Talmud)
Lev Tolstoy (1828-1910) in an 1884 portrait by Nikolay Ge (1831-1894)
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