Leo Tolstoy (1828-1910)

Quotes

• Everything that I understand, I understand only because I love.

• True life is lived when tiny changes occur.

• What counts in making a happy marriage is not so much how compatible you are, but how you deal with incompatibility.

• If I were told that what I shall write will be read in twenty years by the children of today and that they will weep and smile over it and will fall in love with life, I would devote all my life and all my strengths to it.

• A man is like a fraction whose numerator is what he is and whose denominator is what he thinks of himself. The larger the denominator, the smaller the fraction.

• Pure and complete sorrow is about as impossible as pure and complete joy.

• Historians are like deaf people who go on answering questions that no one has asked them.

• Everyone thinks of changing the world, but no one thinks of changing himself.

• In the name of God, stop a moment, cease your work, look around you.

• Truth, like gold, is to be obtained not by its growth, but by washing away from it all that is not gold.

• I know that most men, including those at ease with problems of the greatest complexity, can seldom accept even the simplest and most obvious truth if it be such as would oblige them to admit the falsity of conlusions which they have delighted in explaining to colleages, which they have proudly taught to others, and which they have woven, thread by thread, into the fabric of their lives.

• The strongest of all warriors are these two -- Time and Patience.

• What a strange illusion it is to suppose that beauty is goodness.

• Crude, immoral, vulgar and senseless.

• I know that most men, including those at ease with problems of the greatest complexity, can seldom accept even the simplest and most obvious truth if it be such as would oblige them to admit the falsity of conclusions which they have delighted in explaining to colleagues, which they have proudly taught to others, and which they have woven, thread by thread, into the fabric of their lives.

• She had wit, she had grace, she had beauty; But above all, she had truth.

• Art is not a handicraft, it is the transmission of feeling the artist has experienced.

• Happy families are all alike; every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way.

• If one has no vanity in this life of ours, there is no sufficient reason for living.

• A man is like a fraction whose numerator is what he is and whose denominator is what he thinks of himself. The larger the denominator the smaller the fraction.