Leo Tolstoy

Pierre was right when he said that one must believe in the possibility of happiness in order to be happy, and I now believe in it. Let the dead bury the dead, but while I’m alive, I must live and be happy.

Something magical has happened to me: like a dream when one feels frightened and creepy, and suddenly wakes up to the knowledge that no such terrors exist. I have wakened up.

I always loved you, and if one loves anyone, one loves the whole person, just as they are and not as one would like them to be. -Dolly (Anna Karenina)

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

In the best, the friendliest and simplest relations flattery or praise is necessary, just as grease is necessary to keep wheels turning.

My principal sin is doubt. I doubt everything, and am in doubt most of the time.

Not life, but good life, is to be chiefly valued.

Sometimes people mistake the way I talk for what I am thinking.

Poverty consist in feeling poor.

Travel is a fools paradise.

Any enlightenment which requires to be authenticated, certified, recognized, congratulated, is false, or at least incomplete.

We must annex those people. We can afflict them with our wise and beneficent government. We can introduce the novelty of thieves, all the way up from street-car pickpockets to municipal robbers and Government defaulters, and show them how amusing it is to arrest them and try them and then turn them loose – some for cash and some for political influence. We can make them ashamed of their simple and primitive justice. We can make that little bunch of sleepy islands the hottest corner on earth, and array it in the moral splendor of our high and holy civilization. Annexation is what the poor islanders need. Shall we to men benighted, the lamp of life deny?

Nature will bear the closest inspection. She invites us to lay our eye level with her smallest leaf, and take an insect view of its plain.

Travel is fatal to prejudice, bigotry, and narrow-mindedness, and many of our people need it sorely on these accounts. Broad, wholesome, charitable views of men and things cannot be acquired by vegetating in one little corner of the earth all one’s lifetime.

We have not all had the good fortune to be ladies. We have not all been generals, or poets, or statesmen; but when the toast works down to the babies, we stand on common ground.

Sweet and glorious it is to die for our country.

We are always paid for our suspicion by finding what we suspect.

Prosperity is the best protector of principle.

Why do the words I want to say, struggle to come out of my mouth. Why does fear have such a grip over me. I shouldn’t have to battle to say all the complimentary things I so desperately want to share. It shouldn’t be this hard, that I have to force myself; it’s wrong that such loving words, should have to be spoken under such duress. I’m aware of how wrong it is, but withholding is all I have known, even though I desire so badly to share my thoughts and feelings with you, as freely as you do with me.

If I have said something to hurt a man once, I shall not get the better of this by saying many things to please him.

Do not waste your time on Social Questions. What is the matter with the poor is Poverty; what is the matter with the rich is Uselessness.