Don't make the classic smart person's mistake of thinking no one's smarter than you.
I've got all the money I'll ever need, if I die by four o'clock.
Everybody is a genius. But if you judge a fish by its ability to climb a tree, it will live its whole life believing that it is stupid.
Sometimes the moment you've waited for comes at the most inopportune time...
Sometimes it just takes a moment to forget a life, but sometimes life is not enough to forget for a moment.
Each man lived his own life, and paid his own price for living it.
If you want something you've never had, you must be willing to do something you've never done.
Theory is when you know everything and nothing works; practice is when everything works and nobody knows why. Here we combine theory with practice: nothing works and nobody knows why.
The greatest mistake you can make in life is to be continually fearing you will make one.
Just because somebody's dead, you don't just stop liking them, for God's sake — especially if they were about a thousand times nicer than the people you know that're alive and all.
It’s easier to part with a man than with illusions about him.
I mean, if I had known the last time I saw you would be the last time, I... I would have stopped to memorize your face, the way you moved. Everything about you. If I had known the last time I kissed you would be the last time... I never would have stopped.
I already love in you your beauty, but I am only beginning to love in you that which is eternal and ever precious – your heart, your soul. Beauty one could get to know and fall in love with in one hour and cease to love it as speedily; but the soul one must learn to know. Believe me, nothing on earth is given without labour, even love, the most beautiful and natural of feelings. <...> But the more difficult the labour and hardship, the higher the reward.
Explanation:
Count Leo Tolstoi to Valeria Arseneva, his fiance. November 2, 1856
My brother once told me that nothing someone says before the word "but" really counts.