Thoughtful Wisdom for Every Day

In his last years Leo Tolstoy assembled and reread a book he considered his most important work: a calendar of wisdom, gathered from the world's sacred texts and from his own thinking, which he kept on his desk and returned to daily for the last seven years of his life.

Thoughtful Wisdom for Every Day is Peter Sekirin's condensation of that project. Sekirin, who translated and edited the original Calendar of Wisdom, reduces a philosophical work of more than a thousand pages to a single page for each day of the year — brief passages and aphorisms, arranged to move through a recurring cycle of themes each month: God, the soul, desire, faith, the passions, humility, inequality, evil, truth, happiness, and the blessings of love.

It is a book meant to be read a page at a time rather than straight through. This edition was published by Arcade Publishing in 2021, translated and edited by Peter Sekirin.