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The excerpt represents the core issue or deciding factor on which you must meditate, and is drawn from Reminiscences of Tolstoy by Leo Tolstoy: help you on with your overcoat?
And why are all these charming rules considered obligatory
toward others, when every day ordinary people come, and we not only
do not ask them to sit down or to stop to dinner or spend the night
or render them any service, but would look on it as the height of
impropriety?
Where do those people end to whom we are under these
obligations? By what characteristics are the one sort
distinguished from the others? And are not all these rules of
politeness bad, if they do not extend to all sorts of people? And
is not what we call politeness an illusion, and a very ugly
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