Leo Tolstoy

If we admit that human life can be ruled by reason, then all possibility of life is destroyed.

All the variety, all the charm, all the beauty of life is made up of light and shadow.

All great literature is one of two stories; a man goes on a journey or a stranger comes to town.

If everyone fought for their own convictions there would be no war.

Every lie is a poison; there are no harmless lies. Only the truth is safe. Only the truth gives me consolation – it is the one unbreakable diamond.

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)

The world is all gates, all opportunities, strings of tension waiting to be struck.

A great man is always willing to be little.

We are apt to love praise, but not deserve it. But if we would deserve it, we must love virtue more than that.

Rummaging in our souls, we often dig up something that ought to have lain there unnoticed.

There are a terrible lot of lies going about the world, and the worst of it is that half of them are true.

I often think that men don’t understand what is noble and what is ignorant, though they always talk about it.

What old people say you cannot do, you try and find that you can. Old deeds for old people, and new deeds for new.

We talk of choosing our friends, but friends are self-elected

To accept some idea of truth without experiencing it is like a painting of a cake on paper which you can not eat.

There is as much difference between the counsel that a friend giveth, and that a man giveth himself, as there is between the counsel of a friend and of a flatterer. For there is no such flatterer as is a man’s self.

I cannot teach anybody anything, I can only make them think.

Everything’s fine today, that is our illusion.

Criticism, as it was first instituted by Aristotle, was meant as a standard of judging well.

Wisdom is like electricity. There is no permanently wise man, but men capable of wisdom, who, being put into certain company, or other favorable conditions, become wise for a short time, as glasses rubbed acquire electric power for a while.

Almost any man knows how to earn money, but not one in a million knows how to spend it.