Quotes by Leo Tolstoy

everything comes in time to him who knows how to wait . . . there is nothing stronger than these two: patience and time, they will do it all.

Patience is waiting. Not passively waiting. That is laziness. But to keep going when the going is hard and slow - that is patience. The two most powerful warriors are patience and time.

oh God! what am I to do if I love nothing but fame and mens esteem?

But perhaps it is always so, that men form their conceptions from fictitious, conventional types, and then—all the combinations made—they are tired of the fictitious figures and begin to invent more natural, true figures.

I assure you that I sleep anywhere, and always like a dormouse.

He felt what a murderer must feel, when he sees the body he has robbed of life. That body, robbed by him of life, was their love, the first stage of their love. There was something awful and revolting in the memory of what had been bought at this fearful price of shame. Shame at their spiritual nakedness crushed her and infected him.

It hurt her to stir up these feelings, but yet she knew that that was the best part of her soul, and that that part of her soul would quickly be smothered in the life she was leading.

Happiness is pleasure without regret

She did not want to talk of her sorrow, but with that sorrow in her heart she could not talk of outside matters.

If a man aspires to a righteous life, his first act of abstinence if from injury to animals.

Perhaps you think Im losing the thread of my thought? Not a bit of it! Im still telling you the story of how I murdered my wife, They asked me in court how I killed her, what I used to do it with. Imbeciles! They thought I killed her that day, the fifth of October, with a knife. It wasnt that day I killed her, it was much earlier. Exactly in the same way as theyre killing their wives now, all of them...

I understood, not with my intellect but with my whole being, that no theories of the rationality of existence or of progress could justify such an act; I realized that even if all the people in the world from the day of creation found this to be necessary according to whatever theory, I knew that it was not necessary and that it was wrong. Therefore, my judgments must be based-on what is right and necessary and not on what people say and do; I must judge not according to progress but according to my own heart.

My belief assumed a form that it commonly assumes among the educated people of our time. This belief was expressed by the word progress. At the time it seemed to me that this word had meaning. Like any living individual, I was tormented by questions of how to live better. I still had not understood that in answering that one must live according to progress, I was talking just like a person being carried along in a boat by the waves and the wind; without really answering, such a person replies to the only important question-Where are we to steer?-by saying, We are being carried somewhere.

During this journey it was as if he again thought over his whole life and reached the same old comforting and hopeless conclusion: that there was no need for him to start anything, that he had to live out his life without doing evil, without anxiety, and without wishing for anything.

The memories of home and of her children rose up in her imagination with a peculiar charm quite new to her, with a sort of new brilliance. That world of her own seemed quite new to her now so sweet and precious that she would not on any account spend an extra day outside it, and she made up her mind that she would certainly go back next day.

I ... having filled my life with the spiritual blessings Christianity gave me, brimful of these blessings and living by them, I, like a child, not understanding them, destroy them -- that is, I wish to destroy that by which I live.

Men are like rivers: the water is the same in each, and alike in all; but every river is narrow here, is more rapid there, here slower, there broader, now clear, now cold, now dull, now warm. It is the same with men. Every man carries in himself the germs of every human quality, and sometimes one manifests itself, sometimes another, and the man often becomes unlike himself, while still remaining the same man.

The main qualities that had earned him this universal respect in the service were, first, an extreme indulgence towards people, based on his awareness of his own shortcomings; second, a perfect liberalism, not the sort he read about in the newspapers, but the sort he had in his blood, which made him treat all people, whatever their rank or status, in a perfectly equal and identical way; and, third - most important - a perfect indifference to the business he was occupied with, owing to which he never got carried away and never made mistakes.

How strange it was to think that he, who such a short time ago dared not believe in the happiness of her loving him, now felt unhappy because she loved him too much!

While I doubted, I had hope; but now there is no hope left and all the same I doubt everything.