Everything comes in time to him who knows how to wait.
Lev Nikolayevich Tolstoy (1828–1910) was a Russian novelist, author of War and Peace and Anna Karenina. In middle age he underwent a profound change and turned to Christian anarchism and non-violence, renouncing property and the rights to his own work. His writing on non-violence influenced Gandhi directly.
About this theme: Patience
Patience fares badly in an age measured in loading times. Yet nearly every tradition that wrote about it separates two things everyday speech runs together: waiting and enduring. The first is passive; the second is not. The Latin patientia comes from a verb meaning to suffer or bear — something actively carried, not an idle interval.
More by Leo Tolstoy
More on Patience
- Drop by drop is the water pot filled.— Buddha
- Dripping water hollows out stone, not through force but through persistence.— Ovid
- He who would learn to fly one day must first learn to stand and walk.— Friedrich Nietzsche
- Grain by grain a loaf, stone by stone a palace.— Croatian Proverb
- I was taught that the way of progress was neither swift nor easy.— Marie Curie