Meaning of “The true life is the life which adds…”

The Kingdom of God Is Within You, Chapter IV; Constance Garnett translation, Project Gutenberg #43302. In Tolstoy’s threefold account of animal, social and divine conceptions of life, the divine conception is governed by love and directed toward God rather than personal enjoyment or social glory.

Unto This Last, fourth essay; Project Gutenberg #36541. The line follows Ruskin’s distinction between production and consumption and retains the nineteenth-century political-economy setting.

The Prophet, “On Giving.”

Opening line of the poem.

My Confession, Leo Wiener translation; Tolstoy describes how closer attention to living and departed people increased his affection for them and altered his ability to live.

Our Mutual Friend, Book III, Chapter IX (“Somebody Becomes the Subject of a Prediction”), verified against Project Gutenberg #883 and the stable Wikisource chapter transcription. John Rokesmith (the Secretary) answers Bella Wilfer after she calls herself “useless enough in this world.” This older catalog row modernizes Dickens’s represented wording “who lightens the burden of it for any one else” to “who lightens the burden of it to anyone else”; the frozen quotation remains unchanged and is explicitly treated as a wording variant of the same passage. This is fictional character dialogue about practical usefulness, not an empirical or clinical definition of human worth.