Leo Tolstoy

Man cannot possess anything as long as he fears death. But to him who does not fear it, everything belongs. If there was no suffering, man would not know his limits, would not know himself.

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

Happiness is an allegory, unhappiness a story.

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

Music is the shorthand of emotion

If you want to be happy, be.

Trust thyself: every heart vibrates to that iron string.

Drive a nail home and clinch it so faithfully that you can wake up in the night and think of your work with satisfaction,a work at which you would not be ashamed to invoke the Muse.

We shall show mercy, but we shall not ask for it.

There is no private life which has not been determined by a wider public life.

Bad times have a scientific value. These are occasions a good learner would not miss.

Nothing is ever done in this world until men are prepared to kill one another if it is not done.

We should distrust any enterprise that requires new clothes.

If you can’t fly, then run, if you can’t walk run, then walk, if you can’t walk, then crawl, but by all means keep moving.

All schools, all colleges, have two great functions: to confer, and to conceal, valuable knowledge. The theological knowledge which they conceal cannot justly be regarded as less valuable than that which they reveal. That is, when a man is buying a basket of strawberries it can profit him to know that the bottom half of it is rotten.

We’re comic. We’re all comics. We live in a comic time. And the worse it gets the more comic we are.

The wound is the place where the light enters you.

In literature the ambition of the novice is to acquire the literary language: the struggle of the adept is to get rid of it.

We do not count a man’s years until he has nothing else to count.

Genius always finds itself a century too early.

Injustice in the end produces independence.