"Thursday evg." "Tolstoy goes on being interesting. He is trying in views about women but I still think, as I did in the avalanche, that they are absolutely of a piece with all the rest of him. They go with his thinking manual labour so vastly better than intellectual work. As I read more of him, his lack of civilization puts me off—about women, politics, science, art, everything. He relapses into the Oriental quietist. Why it vexes one is that it leaves all one's really difficult problems untouched. I feel anybody could be virtuous in such a simple life as he recommends. The problem is to live an artificial complicated life and yet retain the simple love and the directness and honesty that belongs with manual work. That is a problem he never considers. But he is no worse about women than about mathematicians!"

"My German friend threatens to be an infliction—he came back with me after my lecture and argued till dinner-time—obstinate and perverse, but I think not stupid."

[Wittgenstein]