Leo Tolstoy

Instead of going to Paris to attend lectures, go to the public library, and you won’t come out for twenty years, if you really wish to learn.

God is the same everywhere.

Which is worse? The wolf who cries before eating the lamb or the wolf who does not.

The best stories don’t come from ‘good vs. bad’ but ‘good vs. good.’

We walked to meet each other up at the time of our love and then we have been irresistibly drifting in different directions, and there’s no altering that.

It’s not given to people to judge what’s right or wrong. People have eternally been mistaken and will be mistaken, and in nothing more than in what they consider right and wrong.

The general root of superstition is that men observe when things hit, and not when they miss; and commit to memory the one, and forget and pass over the other.

Common people do not pray; they only beg.

Evolution is the law of policies: Darwin said it, Socrates endorsed it, Cuvier proved it and established it for all time in his paper on The Survival of the Fittest. These are illustrious names, this is a mighty doctrine: nothing can ever remove it from its firm base, nothing dissolve it, but evolution.

Sincerity is the highest complement you can pay.

By the rude bridge that arched the flood,Their flag to April’s breeze unfurled,Here once the embattled farmers stood,And fired the shot heard round the world.

The foolish are like ripples on water, For whatsoever they do is quickly effaced; But the righteous are like carvings upon stone, For their smallest act is durable.

A strenuous soul hates cheap success.

You cannot run faster than a bullet.

A man is in general better pleased when he has a good dinner upon his table, than when his wife talks Greek.

Where secrecy or mystery begins, vice or roguery is not far off.

He who learns but does not think is lost. He who thinks but does not learn is in great danger.

Our tastes greatly alter. The lad does not care for the child’s rattle, and the old man does not care for the young man’s whore.

Is not marriage an open question, when it is alleged, from the beginning of the world, that such as are in the institution wish to get out, and such as are out wish to get in?

Somewhere inside all of us is the power to change the world.

You live longer once you realize that any time spent being unhappy is wasted.