2 quotations linked to War and Peace by or associated with Leo Tolstoy, with source notes, explanations and related topics.
Time, patience, greatness, simplicity, goodness, truth, war, historical judgment and Tolstoy’s narrator-level reflections on action and reputation.
Use these links when you want to inspect the wording in its wider work or edition.
“The strongest of all warriors are these two—Time and Patience.”
Some conflicts are changed less by force than by endurance and the gradual effects of time.
War and Peace; public-domain translations vary slightly.
“There is no greatness where there is not simplicity, goodness, and truth.”
Greatness is stripped of spectacle and measured instead by moral clarity, goodness, and freedom from unnecessary complication.
War and Peace; the narrator’s judgment of greatness appears in the novel’s discussion of Kutuzov, simplicity, goodness and truth.
