Page:Gorky - Reminiscences of Leo Nicolayevitch Tolstoi.djvu/19

 in our time.' Six hundred years have passed and all the intellectuals hammer away at each other: 'There are no miracles, there are no miracles.' And all the people believe in miracles, just as they did in the twelfth century."

HE minority feel the need of God because they have got everything else, the majority because they have nothing." I would put it differently: the majority believe in God from cowardice, only the few believe in him from fullness of soul.

["You like Andersen's Tales?" he asked thoughtfully. "I couldn't make them out when they first appeared in the translation of Marko-Vovtchok, but about ten years later I took up the book and read it, and suddenly realized with great clearness that Andersen was very lonely—very. I don't know about his life, but he seems to have lived loosely and to have travelled a great deal, but that only confirms my feeling that he was lonely. And because of that he addressed himself to the young, although it's a mistake to imagine that children pity a man more than grown-ups do. Children pity nothing; they do not know what pity is."]