... Well, enough about this.

I am going to write out what I thought during this time:

1) When all is said and done, it is those people over whom violence is used who always rule, i.e., those who fulfil the law of non-resistance. So women seek rights, but it is they who rule, just because they are the ones subjected to force—they were and they still are. Institutions are in the power of men, but public opinion is in the power of women. And public opinion is a million times stronger than any laws and armies. The proof that public opinion is in the hands of women is that not only the construction of homes, food, are determined by women, and not only do the women spend the wealth, consequently control the labour of men, but the success of works of art, of books, even the appointment of rulers, are determined by public opinion; and public opinion is determined by women. Some one well said that men must seek emancipation from women, and not the contrary.

2) (For The Appeal).[170] Unmask the deceivers, spread the truth and do not fear. If it were a matter of spreading deception and murder, then of course, it would be terrible, but here you would be spreading the freedom from deception and murder. Besides, there is no ground for fear. Of whom? They ... are themselves afraid.

I remember there worked for us in our village a weak and phlegmatic 12 year-old boy who once caught on the road and brought back, an enormous healthy peasant, a thief, who had taken a coat from the hall.

3) The poets, the verse-makers torture their tongues in order to be able to say every possible kind of thought in every possible variety of word and to be able to form from all these words something which resembles a thought. Such exercise can only be indulged in by unserious people. And so it is.

4) If we never moved, then everything which we saw would appear to us flat and not in perspective. Motion gives us a conception of things in three dimensions of space. The same thing is true concerning the material side of things: if we weren’t living, were not moving in life, we would see only the material side of things; but moving in life, moving our spiritual side across the material side of the world, we recognise the falseness of the idea that the material is actually such as it appears to us.

5) Twenty times I have repeated it, and 20 times the thought comes to me as new, that release from all excitement, fear, suffering, from physical and especially from spiritual, lies in destroying in one’s self the illusion of the union of one’s spiritual “self” with one’s physical. And this is always possible. When the illusion is destroyed then the spiritual “self” can suffer only from the fact that it is joined to the physical, but not from hunger, pain, sorrow, jealousy, shame, etc. In the first case, as long as it is joined it does that which the physical “self” wants: it gets angry, condemns, scolds, strikes; in the second case, when it is separated from the physical, it does only that which can free it from the torturing union. And only the manifestations of love frees it.

6) For the article on Art. When it is beauty that is recognised as the aim of art, then everything will be art which for certain people will appear as beauty, i.e., everything which will please certain people.

7) I have noted, “the harm of art, especially music” and I wanted to write that I had forgotten, but while I was writing, I remembered. The harm of art is principally this, that it takes up time, hiding from people their idleness. I know that it is harmful when it encourages idleness both for the producers and those who enjoy it, but I cannot see a clear definition of when it is permissible, useful, good. I should like to say only then when it is a rest from labour, like sleep, but I do not yet know if that is so.